More should have been done to allow people to visit loved ones receiving end-of-life care and in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, Northern Ireland’schief medical officer has said.
Appearing before the UK’s Covid-19 inquiry in London on Tuesday, Prof Michael McBride said he was “not certain we always got the balance right around end-of-life decisions around visiting”.
“I think we possibly could have taken a more nuanced approach, and I think we should bear that in mind, that not being able to visit someone, you don’t get that time back again.”
The day-long evidence session was part of a module examining the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the healthcare systems in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.
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Prof McBride has previously given evidence to the inquiry during hearings in Belfast, along with the then first and deputy first ministers and other politicians.
The chief medical officer was questioned on a wide range of areas including shielding – the advice that clinically extremely vulnerable people should remain at home to protect themselves from the virus – and said that, with hindsight, “some of the initial messaging around that could have been more nuanced”.
“While we endeavoured to ensure that we communicated the advice clearly, as honestly as we could based on the information that we had, and tried to keep that updated in a variety of ways, I think the net result of the advice on shielding was we engendered a significant degree of fear in those who were shielding, fear and anxiety.”
Covid-19 “had a heavy, heavy toll on those working in very difficult circumstances, and I have no doubt there was much more we could have done,” he said.
Earlier in the session, the chairwoman of the inquiry, Baroness Hallett, expressed concern at the difficulty in recording data on ethnic background in the Northern Ireland health service, after Prof McBride described “poor ethnicity coding” which meant it was not possible to look at Covid-19 trends from the perspective of ethnic background.
“Within healthcare systems, one can record ethnicity but there is not uniform recording of ethnicity and that is something that clearly does need to be improved,” he said.
The inquiry also considered the problems facing the health service in Northern Ireland at the start of the pandemic, which Prof McBride said meant it was not equipped to meet the needs of its population when the Covid-19 pandemic began.
Prof McBride agreed with counsel to the inquiry Nick Scott KC that the waiting times for a first outpatient appointment in Northern Ireland were “effectively, comparatively, about 2,000 times worse” than in England.
This had, the chief medical officer said, an “extremely negative consequence for people waiting for planned care that was delayed during the pandemic”.
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