Staff still in ‘long recovery’ from covid, says Pritchard

The NHS workforce still has a “long recovery ahead” before it will be back to full “resilience” after covid, Amanda Pritchard told the public inquiry into the pandemic. 

Giving evidence before the inquiry today, the NHS England CEO was asked if she thought the NHS workforce was more or less “resilient” now than going into the pandemic in 2020.

Staff numbers had increased, she said, which was “fantastic”. But reflecting on whether “staff actually feel at the level of resilience to even think about having to do anything like [the pandemic] again”, she said: “There is a long recovery journey ahead.”

Ms Pritchard later said one of her “big reflections” from the experience — during which she was initially NHSE deputy chief, then CEO, was the wisdom of “planning for recovery from the start”.

She stressed: “We are now in a place where we’re still on a very significant recovery journey.” This was “absolutely the case for children and young people’s mental health services and children’s services more broadly, but equally the case for things like elective work”, Ms Pritchard said.

In relation to the waiting list, the NHSE CEO said the service “could now be in a very different position on elective recovery” if government had granted a request from NHSE in July 2020 for funding to open 10,000 additional “non-temporary” beds in NHS hospitals to deal with recovery and potential future covid surges.

The request was rejected by the Treasury and the private office of the then prime minister Boris Johnson.

Instead, the inquiry heard on Monday, they wanted more use to be made of the recently-opened Nightingale hospitals, private services, and speeding up hospital discharge. 

Ms Pritchard said it was “very disappointing” to have the request refused.

She said: “We could certainly have treated thousands more patients if we had had that additional headroom, as well as being more resilient going into the second wave [in autumn/winter 2020-21] and into winter more generally.”

Still in recovery

Asked if the NHS was in a better position in 2024 to cope if there were a pandemic, the former hospital CEO said: “We are very much still in recovery…

“We still have covid patients in hospitals now. We have a very significant job of recovery to do, both to do with care that was disrupted during the pandemic, but also actually recovery for our staff.”

She said the NHS was stronger in some respects, such as “a data infrastructure that is much more sophisticated now” and “a lot more community infrastructure around things like remote services and virtual wards”.

But she said estates may be weaker because government commitments to capital spending and building hospitals had been delayed, and “it will take some time for that to feed through into actually putting the estate of the NHS into the kind of place that you would want [it] to be to see that [capacity] headroom built in”.

Ms Pritchard admitted the NHS was “very close” to running out of beds in particular hospitals and regions during winter 2020-21, and said demand peaks were “completely terrifying” at times.

She agreed with inquiry counsel Jacqueline Carey KC’s characterisation that the NHS was “on the brink” at times in January 2021, particularly in relation to critical care capacity.