I have summarised but you can hear the interview at 1.36 minutes in to today’s programme.
This is what I took from it. Firstly prior to the pandemic:
1)The slowdown in improvement in life expectancy was more marked in the UK than in any other rich country except Iceland and the USA.
2)There had been a large rise in health inequalities, with health for the poorest people outside London, getting worse.
3)Both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, particularly for women, was going down.
4)There was a mirroring of inequality shown in deaths profiled in Covid 19 mortality to inequality in mortality from all causes.
The speakers rejected the idea that failure came from the public’s behaviour being any different to people in other countries. It was systems failure. The quality of governance and the political culture had led to the large inequalities in society that had been growing and the lack of investment had also led to our lower levels of health coming into the pandemic. The reduction of investment in the public sector including the regressive cuts to public spending and the political culture led to a lack of focus on Test and Trace. The political culture had also led to an inability to recognise that we needed to address international travel.
Disinvestment in Public Health since 2014 which has seen about a 25% reduction in spend per person. We also have burden of non-communicable diseases which has grown in this period. Only 8% of those who died in Scotland from Covid 19 did not have an underlying condition and that is particularly the case for those who died who were younger. Our government also failed to understand or recognise that this was not a pandemic ‘flu’. It was a different kind of virus and we needed to respond more like South East Asian countries.
Suggestions for what should be done immediately were:
1)Recognising the common good and the lack of investment that has been made in it.
2)Recognising the important role of government and public service. You can’t get away with defunding public services for a decade and then expect to be in a good place to manage the next pandemic.
3)Recognising the failure of Test, Trace and Isolate appallingly managed by the private sector. If it had been given to the NHS and local Public Health could they have done a better job?
4)Recognise the problems of deep seeded inequalities.
5)Aligning our health improvement and our communicable disease response. We need to deal with non-communicable diseases at the same level as we deal with communicable diseases.
Only if we have a healthy, more equal population will we be better prepared for the next epidemic or pandemic.
To obliterate your address on packaging
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