NHS underfunding to blame for rise in Covid deaths, BMA claims

CHRONIC neglect of the NHS, a lack of pandemic preparedness and “flawed” government policies contributed to the coronavirus death toll, the BMA will say today.

Speaking at the trade union’s Annual Representative Meeting, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the BMA council chair, is expected to deliver a damning assessment of the Government’s handling of the pandemic.

Dr Nagpaul will argue that the health service was already in crisis before March 2020 after parts had been “starved” by a lack of facilities and almost 90,000 staff vacancies.

Latest NHS England figures show that 5.6 million people are now waiting to start treatment, up from 4.2 million in March last year. The BMA “will not accept a return to the old pre-pandemic NHS”, Dr Nagpaul will say.

“We will not accept a return to the old pre-pandemic NHS, which was so patently under-staffed, underresourced, that over 9 in 10 doctors say they are afraid of medical errors daily.

“We will not accept an NHS running at unsafe bed occupancy and without spare capacity such that the pandemic surge meant we had to shut down services for non-covid patients for months. We will not accept an NHS in crisis every summer, let alone every winter.”

A lack of PPE stockpiles for frontline health workers during the pandemic lead to some procurements being “unsafe or unusable”, the BMA says.

He will also use his speech to highlight the UK’S death toll, which he says has increased by more than 4,000 since so-called freedom day.

“Since 19 July 37,000 people have been hospitalised, and 4,000 have died.

“Ministers call this living with Covid but for too many they are suffering or dying with Covid,” he will say.