Health and care leaders failed to acknowledge and report the risks healthcare workers were placed under.
The vast majority of NHS trusts failed to report even a single Covid-19 infection or death among their staff.
The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases & Dangerous Occurrences (RIDDOR) means that employers are legally mandated to report serious workplace accidents and occupational diseases.
A Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request published by the Byline Times reveals that NHS trusts in England and Wales failed to follow this procedure.
During the first two waves of the Covid-19 pandemic, two-thirds of NHS employers failed to report a single case of occupational-acquired Covid-19 and the vast majority (82%) also suggest not a single worker died after being exposed at work.
Meanwhile, Health Select Committee figures suggest that between 20-40% of the public who died from Covid-19 were infected in hospital.
Acute on chronic shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) during the pandemic often left health and care workers looking after Covid-19 patients with no more than thin plastic aprons and surgical masks. Calls for a higher level of protection were often denied by Public Health England (PHE) and organisations often relied on public donations.
Impossible to believe.
An open letter from David Osborn, a health and safety consultant and member of the Covid-19 Airborne Transmission Alliance (CATA), dubs the figures “impossible to believe”.
Writing to the Chief Executive of the Health and Safety Executive and Health Secretary Steve Barclay, Mr Osbourn claims there has been a total “failure” to acknowledge and report the risks healthcare workers were placed under.
Osborn writes: “It is inconceivable that every healthcare worker in two-thirds of our hospitals had some sort of extraordinary immunity from the disease whilst they were at work, but which lapsed as soon as they were outside the hospital walls, enabling them to conveniently ‘become infected out in the community’ (as claimed by many Trusts).”
“Most health care workers would have been even more diligent than most citizens at complying with these measures, being only too aware of the death, suffering and misery they were seeing all around them daily at their place of work,” he adds.
Osborn goes on to suggest a cover-up. He adds “that there has been an enormous, well co-ordinated cover-up intended to deliberately conceal the true impact on HCWs as the pandemic ploughed into them.”
