Findings of Government-backed Covid inquiry need to be acted upon, UCD conference told

The findings of any inquiry into the State’s handing of Covid-19 need to feed into better preparedness for a similar healthcare emergency in the future, a UCD conference has been told. Former chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan, Phil Ní Sheaghdha of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation and Ibec chief executive Danny McCoy all suggested that society needed to be far better prepared in the event of another pandemic and should plan for the eventuality.

Speaking at the Lessons from Working During Covid-19 symposium hosted by UCD’s human resources management and employment relations group at the Smurfit Business College, Mr McCoy said it was “important that we learn the lessons but there has to be a firm commitment too to put in place measures based on what the finding are. Otherwise all the inquiry would be is a look back at what happened.”

During a panel discussion mediated by UCD professor John Geary, who, along with Maria Belizon and Paul MacFlynn authored a report based on the experiences of almost 1,000 essential workers during the pandemic, Dr Holohan said it was important a broad discussion takes place on the model of care that people in Ireland want in the future. As it was, he said, the disadvantaged in society had been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and “we couldn’t have done a better job of placing older people in the path of this infection than with the design of the nursing home care we have in this country”.

He said addressing issues like that “will not be an easy fix” but that an inquiry could be a beneficial process. It was important that, unlike in some other jurisdictions, “we have something that is healthy and is actually about the real issues”.

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Ms Ní Sheaghdha said it would be important to look “how we support our public health system… [because] we’re there again, there are 500 trolleys on corridors, our hospitals again are operating at 110 per cent. So we’ve back in exactly the same cycle in the event that something like Covid happens again.”

Kevin Figgis, one of a number of union officials attending the event, said the involvement of healthcare workers in devising systems to deal with the scale of the problems posed by the pandemic had been quickly abandoned with its passing.

The conference was told that the survey of workers on which the report published late last year was based found that at least six in 10 essential workers in Ireland during the pandemic were subject to moderate or high levels of risk of getting Covid, with women at higher risk than men.

Essential workers experienced high levels of anxiety, and almost seven out of 10 spoke to managers about mitigating risks yet only half of those felt their concerns were fully addressed. Mitigation measures, the survey also suggested, were better where higher paid workers were involved.

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