Peer spells out NHS challenge after pandemic
LIFE GROWING up in Wakefield “wasn’t all strawberries and cream”, says Lord Victor Adebowale, whose highly-qualified Nigerian parents moved to the UK in search of a bright future for their family.
The chairman of the NHS Confederation, a ‘People’s Peer’ in the Lords since 2001 and whose title Baron Adebowale of Thornes refers to the area of the city which he called home, is “very proud of being a Yorkshireman” and “learned a lot from my past”.
His father tried repeatedly and failed to get into medical school here despite his strong academic record. And his mother, who already had the same qualifications for nursing and midwifery as were demanded here back in the early 1960s, was told she must qualify again – which she did while working in a factory.
“We didn’t have a lot of money, we had no money at all,” Lord Adebowale says, reflecting on his childhood during an interview from his home at the start of March. “My mum brought up four kids on pretty much a nurse’s salary, which is no mean feat.
“But what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as they say. And I’ve been blessed with both resilience and luck to be honest.”
It is not hard to see how those same two qualities have been needed in the last year by the tens of thousands of health workers whose organisations come under the umbrella of the NHS Confederation, where Lord Adebowale has been chair since last April.
A membership body bringing together and speaking on behalf of organisations that plan, commission and provide NHS services, the confederation represents hospitals, community and mental health providers, ambulance trusts, primary care networks, clinical commissioning groups and integrated care systems.
And while the latest figures show the pressure on health services from the pandemic is starting to ease, it comes after 12 months when Lord Adebowale says health and social care staff have been pushed “to the very limit of their capabilities”.
“The NHS has done a remarkable job, we went into this pandemic with about 100,000 vacancies,” he says. “So it wasn’t as though we went into the pandemic fully staffed, we’d already asked the government for more money for capital, because our hospitals needed rebuilding, and we needed to maintain the performance on elective care. And we went into this pandemic not in the best of shape, and we’re coming out of it having achieved remarkable things with not a lot.
“I think the public appreciate that, and expect politicians to reflect on that. And we have to learn, we’ve had over 121,000 people die. We owe it to those people to learn from those deaths.”
A leading figure in the housing association movement, Lord Adebowale was made a CBE in 2000 and he was appointed as one of the first ‘People’s Peers’ in 2001, becoming a crossbench member of the Lords.
For two decades he was chief executive of Turning Point, the social enterprise organisation that provides health and care services across England. Taking on the chairmanship of the confederation as the pandemic’s impact was just starting to bite, he describes it as “a really exciting opportunity to help shape the future of health and social care”.
“We had to pull ourselves together, operate in a different way, get virtual as they say, but also stay in touch with our members to work out what it is that we can do for them that will add value. And that’s what we’ve done.
“Our health and social care members have pulled this country through one of the biggest crises since the Second World War, but to focus on the future as well, because it’s the future that will create health and wealth for all of us.”
He describes in numbers the challenges posed for health services even after the pressure of Covid-19 cases has receded. There’s a backlog of 4.5m people for elective care, as well as an extra 10 million mental health cases as a direct result of the pandemic.
“We have to respond to the massive backlog in mental health, both in children and in adults, that we’re going to have to face,” Lord Adebowale says. “And that’s going to require investment, as well as new ways of delivering interventions across the piece.”
He adds: “We’re making our views heard whether (the Government) asked for them or not, because I think it’s our duty to, but we wrote to the Prime Minister recently setting out the need for a very cautious approach to getting back to what people might call normal, which hopefully will be better than normal, which I’m glad to say he’s taken up.”