NHS failed pandemic test four years ago
THE NHS failed a government test of its ability to handle a pandemic but the “terrifying” results were kept from the public, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
Ministers were informed three years ago that Britain would be overwhelmed by a severe outbreak amid a shortage of critical care beds, morgue capacity and personal protective equipment (PPE).
Exercise Cygnus, a three-day dry run for a pandemic carried out in October 2016, tested how NHS hospitals and other services would cope in the event of a major flu outbreak with a similar mortality rate to Covid-19.
Whitehall officials deemed Cygnus’s findings too sensitive to be made public, but The Telegraph has established that it revealed that the NHS lacked adequate “surge capacity”, bosses would need to “switch off ” large parts of the health service, and medics would need to adopt a “battlefield” mentality with patients prioritised according to their survival chances. Despite these failings, the Government never changed its strategic roadmap for a pandemic, with the last update carried out in 2014. Ministers now face questions over why the NHS is struggling with a shortage of ventilators and hospital beds.
Officials involved in drawing up the exercise, however, insisted “serious lessons were learnt” and said Britain was now one of the best-prepared countries in the world to deal with coronavirus and its consequences.
“It’s right to say that the NHS was
stretched beyond breaking point by Cygnus,” said one senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“People might say we have blood on our hands, but the fact is that it’s always easier to manage the last outbreak than the one coming down the track.”
The findings of Exercise Cygnus remain classified, with officials citing “biosecurity concerns” and a desire not to frighten the public as a reason for keeping the documents secret.
More than 1,000 organisations took part in the cross-government exercise in October 2016, including NHS trusts and the military.
Each was asked to demonstrate how they would cope with a major influenza outbreak with a maximum national death toll of 500,000. The modelling was supplied by Imperial College London, the same group of academics now tracking Covid-19.
The verdict was clear – the NHS would be quickly overwhelmed due to major shortages of intensive care beds equipped with life-saving ventilators. Mortuaries would swiftly run out of space, with a dearth of doctors to certify causes of death. Problems were also identified in delivering protective masks and gowns to medical workers on the front line, senior sources said.
Documents seen by The Telegraph show that guidelines were “cascaded” down to individual NHS trusts with instructions on how to better prepare themselves. Some trusts took little action, according to one senior source.
The failings exposed by Cygnus also prompted ministers to draw up a draft emergency legislation, which formed the bulk of the Government’s Coronavirus Bill of last week.
Despite the damning verdict, Cygnus was largely kept quiet, with only a passing reference made during the NHS England board meeting in March 2017. Dame Sally Davies, then the country’s chief medical officer, briefly mentioned it during a speech at the World Innovation Summit for Health in December 2016, when she said the exercise’s lessons were “worrying”.
Last night, sources close to the team
‘The NHS was stretched beyond breaking point. People might say we have blood on our hands’
at Imperial College said they had been “unpleasantly surprised” by the apparent lack of preparation for an outbreak revealed by Cygnus.
“These exercises are supposed to prepare government for something like this – but it appears they were aware of the problem but didn’t do much about it,” a source said.
A spokesman for Jeremy Hunt, then health secretary, said: “Jeremy was acutely aware the NHS needed more capacity which is why he fought for and secured an £8billion and then a £20billion increase in the NHS annual budget during that period.”
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We regularly test our pandemic plans and the learnings from previous exercises have helped allow us to rapidly respond to Covid-19.”