Fine-tune Covid lessons to ‘transform’ the NHS: top medic

Dr Tom Black, who has been working on the frontline in the battle against Coronavirus, says the NHS should take all the “good parts” of what happened during the pandemic - teamworking, rapid change, use of technology - and leverage these to improve the whole system.

Dr Black, who is also chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) in NI, believes we are now past the worst for this phase of Covid-19.

“We are seeing fewer cases every day and, thankfully, fewer people are losing their lives to this terrible disease”, he told the ‘Journal’.

“This is down to people observing social distancing and following the lockdown measures we were asked to undertake. Sadly, though, there are still many families grieving the loss of a loved one and many who will feel long term health impacts of this disease.”

He added: “It’s now time to start to reflect on what has happened and, unfortunately, look at what we have learnt and what we would need to do if we saw the number of cases begin to rise again.

“This was a completely new disease so we have learnt a lot about how to treat it in a relatively short space of time.

“We also need to look at how we resume and manage services for patients, both those who need to see their GP and those who need a hospital appointment.

“We already had a dreadful situation with waiting lists and the health minister has already said he doesn’t want us to go back to doing the same thing. We really need to transform our health system.”

Dr Black insists we also need to look at how we care for our older people and how we can make sure that our care homes are able to look after our older population in a safe and appropriate way.

“As lockdown measures continue to ease, we still need to take a measured approach to what we do and follow guidelines around social distancing, wearing masks, washing our hands and seeking help if we have any covid symptoms.”