Divide and delay over vaccine

Covid-19 has brought into stark relief the ‘pre-existing condition’ of health and social care in East Kent.

East Kent is a microcosm of the UK, with pockets of wealth cheek by jowl with deprivation.

Many coastal communities here and along the south coast suffer from high unemployment, poor housing, precarious employment conditions and a lack of resources to sustain adequate social resilience.

The travails of the East Kent Hospitals Trust in the last decade are symptomatic of an organisation struggling to cope with economic circumstances beyond its control. Not only is working within areas of significant social deprivation but East Kent has a large population of retirees, who make greater demands on what in some areas is a threadbare health care system.

The roll out of the vaccination programme is an example of this threadbare provision. One need only look at a map of the Clinical Commissioning Group’s vaccination hub layout to see big holes in provision in some areas.

West of Ashford is comprehensive provision and in a timely manner. East of Ashford, it is a different matter. There are fewer vaccination centres and they not super hubs.

Some GP s have pushed on and are vaccinating at speed and their activities puts them firmly in the pantheon of NHS heroes, elsewhere provision has been inadequate and tardy.

The plan has all the features of a managerialist bureaucracy, which designs projects on classic ‘groupthink’ parameters. Richard Styles