As kids we really loved snow. I remember one year we had enough of it to build an igloo, which was unusual enough in Brixton that we made the radio news. My brothers and I persuaded the reporter, who was quite a tall man, to crawl through the narrow door. The igloo was big enough to fit four of us in there with him. I said I would never ever grow up to be “that grouchy old auntie who complains about the snow”.
Sadly, I am now that grouchy old auntie. Increasingly I look forward to the winter months with anxiety, and I look out on freshly fallen snow with dread. What we used to call “winter pressures” in the NHS is now the year-round new normal since the pandemic began five years ago. Every winter the system goes into crisis management. Hospital staff increasingly find their jobs a cause of chronic stress and, like me, dread the annual winter crisis. It’s also frankly traumatic for all of us as patients and carers trying to access services in an emergency.
Grandma fell and broke her hip
In 2022, Grandma went out into her frost-sparkling back garden, slipped on black ice and fell. Behind every ‘winter crisis ambulance wait-time statistic report’ is someone’s nan waiting in the freezing cold with a broken hip, someone’s son waiting for an emergency transfer to a specialist unit in another hospital, someone’s dad having a heart attack and not getting the care they need quickly enough.
Grandma is a tough old bird. She recovered well from her hip replacement, but at that point she became a bed-blocking statistic: she couldn’t be discharged until social care and rehab could be arranged. Then she got Covid from a patient who—incredibly—was given a bed in the same bay despite having tested positive.
Measures to prevent Covid spreading were not in place
This just seems nuts to people outside the NHS. We’ve known for years that SARS and flu viruses are airborne, they are exhaled with the mist that makes your breath visible on a cold day. It hangs around like invisible smoke in warm, unventilated indoor spaces. So why are hospital wards unventilated, and patients with viral infections given beds next to frail elderly grandmas recovering from operations? The answer is that the infection prevention and control guidance needs updating.
I wrote to my MP about this, who forwarded my letter to the government minister responsible. The upshot was a cut-and-paste standard reply, which effectively said there are established mechanisms for updating the guidance, and there are no plans to do so. Two years later, patients are still being put at risk from preventable hospital acquired infections, which are not infrequently fatal. Grandma, still going strong at ninety, was one of the lucky ones.
So far nothing seems to have changed under Labour
That was two years ago. We had high hopes for our new Labour government, but they still haven’t fixed it. We’ve had the UK Covid Inquiry, which heard ample evidence on airborne infection risks and the need for updated IPC guidance. Yet here we are, in a record-breaking flu wave, with excited kids wondering if there might be enough snow to build an igloo, while other peoples’ nans are ending up in hospital beds next to very sick flu patients, and no way to stop it spreading round the ward. All the while, fifteen ambulances are stacked up outside A&E.
This is unsustainable and impacts the health and wellbeing of hospital staff: it is so bad this year that Stephen Powis compared it to the worst days of Covid. Staff are off sick more frequently than before the pandemic, with one in three reporting symptoms of Long-Covid.
Employers’ duty to provide a safe work environment
In principle, our employers are supposed to protect us from hazards in the workplace, but everyone seems to assume they get a free pass on airborne infectious diseases. The UKHSA guidelines seem designed to give that impression, framing clean air as an optional extra that employers “might like to consider” rather than as an absolute right of employees not to be forced to inhale a virus soup of other peoples’ infectious breath-mist in their place of work.
Workers everywhere are similarly at risk during Covid waves, which still rip through our unprotected population five or six times a year. The hospitality industry was hit hard by lockdowns during the initial emergency response to the pandemic, and nobody wants to go back to such extreme measures. But if you are ignoring your “cold symptoms” whilst “eating out to help out” with the economic rebound, spare a thought for the chef for whom losing their sense of taste and smell can be a career-ending form of Long-Covid.
Our Ben got a winter virus
What happened to our son Ben during last year’s now annual winter crisis, was actually worse. Ben, who was at college at the time, now works as a chef in a popular village pub. Always the optimist, he’s just happy he’s recovering and is still able to fulfil his dreams, doing a job he loves. He’s grateful to all the NHS staff who looked after him at the Countess of Chester and St Thomas’s hospitals last winter, when Omicron era “mild” Covid nearly cost him his life.
It started as a run-of-the-mill infection. Everyone his age has got used to being sick several times a year and thinking nothing of it. He kept to his room for a few days to avoid infecting the more vulnerable family members, but he wasn’t seriously ill. A week or so later he felt well enough to go out for a bike ride. I remember him mentioning a pain in his hip when he got home. He just thought he’d strained something cycling. In fact, he had a deep vein thrombosis. At the time, hardly anyone was aware this could be a post-Covid complication, although experts like Dr Rae Duncan were already trying to sound the alarm. The next day his leg was noticeably swollen.
The after-effects of the infection turned into a horror story
Ben is a resilient character, who is relaxed enough to tell this as a Halloween horror story to entertain his mates (whose reaction is chiefly appalled astonishment that this could really happen to someone so young). I still struggle to think about it without flashbacks and feelings of rising panic. To cut a long story short, he spent the whole of his twenty-ninth birthday in a packed A&E waiting to be admitted, by which time his condition was too serious to be treated at the Countess. They wanted to transfer him to St Thomas’s in London for an emergency operation. Standard procedure would be to send him with a member of staff in an ambulance. Of course, this being last winter, there was an ambulance crisis. In the end we were forced to take our son, who was no longer able to walk, on a train in a wheelchair to London. He was admitted to St Thomas’s the following day. We literally spent the night monitoring his condition as best we could in a hotel room with a Fitbit. You couldn’t make it up.
There are hopes the Covid Inquiry will bring about changes
Everyone expects the UK Covid Inquiry to recommend air quality standards in hospitals to mitigate viral spread. But Module 3 is not due to report until spring next year, and there’s no guarantee the Government will implement their recommendations even then. They have just commissioned yet another report on the endemic social care crisis, to add to more than twenty of them already gathering dust on a shelf without their recommendations being implemented. We seriously can’t go on like this. Something must be done to stop the “corridor care” crisis happening again next winter.
Politicians encouraging a culture of amnesia around the risk of infecting other people is not helping. Parents are encouraged to send sick kids to school, where they pass infections round their classmates in overcrowded, unventilated classrooms.
Admitting you are ever unwell (let alone frequently unwell) is admitting that you are weak not only physically, but somehow morally too.
Staying away from the office for a few days to avoid making your colleagues sick – an act that should be seen as considerate – is often seen as selfish. Wearing a mask in public spaces when you’re unwell to protect others is scoffed at.
as Carla Denyer, Green Party co-leader recently said.
We need clean air and vaccinations to reduce NHS pressure
As Professor Stephen Griffin says in his latest Independent SAGE substack article, we need to “mitigate, vaccinate and communicate”. To stop the spread, we need honest, sensible infection prevention and control policies in our hospitals. We need PPE that properly protects healthcare workers from the risk of Long-Covid, and vulnerable patients from hospital-acquired infections. Clean air should be seen as an absolute right for schoolchildren and workers everywhere. We need broader access to vaccinations and boosters. We need coherent, compassionate public health communication.
No-one working in our NHS or potentially needing to access care, which is basically all of us, really wants ‘winter pressure’ stress levels every time Covid spawns a new variant throughout 2025 and forever. No-one wants another winter flu-season crisis like this one. Ever. The festive season will be a time of collective trauma for healthcare workers, patients and carers until the Government does something about this.
And until they do, I’m going to be that grouchy old auntie who complains about the snow.
