- Conference
- 2022 Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 10 December 2021
- Decision
- Carried
When Covid 19 happened in March 2020 we entered a period of rapid change across the public sector in which many of the previously insurmountable barriers to change appeared to fall away. This was nowhere more evident than in the case of the National Health Service. Our healthcare system, faced with transforming almost overnight to cope with unprecedented demands. Especially in the immediate, crisis response, there was a clear message about how much could be achieved at pace. when people were united by a common purpose. Over the last 2 years, services have reacted quickly to changes in demands as new variants emerge and changes happen.
We also need to recognised that this was only possible because the NHS paused a number of services. To cope with the demands of this world wide pandemic public health departments became the centre for expert advice and support in managing through these uncharted waters. A public health system that over a number of years had seen cuts to budgets, reduction in staffing number with little or no capacity to deal with a public health crisis that would soon be overwhelming and sent the whole nation into lockdown.
There is no doubt the UK has experienced one of the most prolonged and acute set of Covid 19 restrictions in the world. This was not only avoidable at the outset but the ideological zeal to privatise has literally cost lives and livelihoods. Introducing a track and trace system where multi-nationals rely on low paid contact centre staff repeatedly try and get individuals who have been exposed to the virus to answer the phone had minimal effect on controlling the virus and where local public health teams were involved in contact tracing, there was a more positive impact on controlling the virus spread. As time has gone one, contact tracing has become more complex as individuals naturally have more contacts due to the lessening of interactions.
However, simply operating Track and Trace within the NHS will not solve all of the issues within the service. There needs to be a public health service which has the expertise to work across the public sector to identify, isolate and ultimately prevent spread of disease. This requires services which have local knowledge and credibility. The pandemic has proven that across the country, public health has been understaffed and underfunded. Conference fundamentally believes that public health services with the appropriately qualified clinical and analytical staff at the heart of the public sector are necessary to prevent another pandemic putting the NHS under pressure to the extent that COVID has again.
Conference calls on the Service Group Executive to establish a communication and engagement campaign to:
1) Highlight the work of members within public health in all four countries in the UK to show the importance of their work within the context of public safety;
2) Establish that to better understand the epidemiology for all cases of Covid 19 public health teams need investment and a move away from years of cuts through the UK government’s austerity agenda. This will be vital to ensure that any pandemic in the future will be managed in a better way;
3) Recognise that we will need to have COVID measures in place for a much longer period of time and that contact tracing should be properly invested in with the skills of the staff recognised. This should involve lodging banding claims for a minimum Band 5 payment for all contact tracers
4) Actively recruit contact tracers into membership of UNISON