Safety regulator refused to investigate some NHS staff Covid deaths

Britain’s safety at work regulator refused to investigate reports from NHS trusts that 10 frontline staff had died as a result of catching Covid-19 during the pandemic.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) declined to look into at least 89 dangerous incidents that NHS trusts said involved healthcare workers being exposed to Covid, including 10 deaths.

The stance taken by the HSE, which oversees workplace health and safety and can bring prosecutions, is disclosed in freedom of information requests by the Pharmaceutical Journal. It has prompted concern that the regulator is too strict in its definition of workplace harm.

It found that 173 trusts in England submitted at least 6,007 reports about employees’ exposure to Covid-19 in the course of their duties to the HSE between 30 January 2020 and 11 March 2022, under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).

They included 213 “dangerous occurrences”, which are incidents that have the potential to cause significant harm; 5,753 cases where a staff member had caught Covid-19; and 41 deaths among people who had been exposed to the disease at their workplace.

However, the HSE refused to look into five Covid deaths reported under the RIDDOR scheme by the Yorkshire ambulance service (YAS) because of what it considered a lack of evidence.

The regulator also decided not to look into the Covid deaths of five staff at University College London hospital acute trust, despite the trust’s belief they had caught it at work. “The HSE found that there was no reasonable evidence that the infection was contracted at work,” a trust spokesperson said.

Shelly Asquith, the health, safety and wellbeing officer at the Trades Union Congress, said the HSE’s decisions and claimed lack of evidence was “really concerning”. It suggested a continued “element of denial about Covid being airborne and it not being possible to necessarily pinpoint where exactly somebody was exposed once it’s in the air”, she added.

Read full story

Source: Guardian, 26 May 2022