Owl has been sent this copy of the Summer 2023 edition of the Local Newspaper – EAST DEVON ECHO

Health officials have brought forward plans for autumn flu and Covid vaccinations after detecting a highly-mutated Covid variant that is spreading around the world.

Ian Sample www.theguardian.com 

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said vaccinations would be available from 11 September in England as a precautionary measure intended to protect the most vulnerable as the winter months approach. The vaccination programme had not been scheduled to launch until early October.

The move comes after scientists at the agency detected the first UK case of the new variant, named BA.2.86, on 18 August and as many schools in England prepare to go back after the summer break next week.

The variant has a large number of mutations and has been spotted in several countries in people without any recent travel history, suggesting that it is spreading in more than one region. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cases have been recorded in Denmark, South Africa, the US and the UK.

BA.2.86 has yet to be classified a “variant of concern”, meaning it has the potential to drive a fresh wave of illness, but health officials decided to bring forward the flu and Covid vaccine programmes to help those at greatest risk of severe disease and reduce the potential impact on the NHS. The large number of mutations make it a contender for evading immune defences built up by previous vaccination and infection.

Under the revised plan, people in care homes for older people, the clinically vulnerable, those aged 65 and over, and health and social care staff can have a Covid vaccine in September. Where possible, the annual flu shot will be made available to the same groups at the same time, the UKHSA said.

“Thanks to the success of our vaccine programme, we have built strong, broad immune defences against new variants throughout the population,” said Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UKHSA. “However, some people remain more vulnerable to severe illness from Covid-19. This precautionary measure to bring forward the autumn programme will ensure these people have protection against any potential wave this winter.”

Scientists have little information on BA.2.86 so its potential impact is hard to estimate. Dame Harries said the agency would continue to monitor the variant and advise the government and the public as it learned more.

It is unclear whether BA.2.86 will cause more severe illness than previous variants. So far, areas that have the variant have not recorded increases in transmission or hospital admissions compared with neighbouring areas where the variant has yet to be detected, the CDC said, though it cautioned that it was too soon to evaluate the variant’s eventual impact.

Genetic analysis shows that BA.2.86 has more than 30 additional mutations compared with BA.2, the Omicron lineage that dominated last year, and more than 35 extra mutations than the XBB.1.5 variant which has so far dominated 2023. The number of extra mutations is similar to when the first Omicron variant, BA.1, emerged and spread rapidly around the globe.

The UK vaccination campaign was originally scheduled for October because the jabs tend to provide the best protection when there is a short gap between receiving the shot and being exposed to the circulating viruses.

Following advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the Covid vaccine will be offered to all adults over 65, residents of care homes for older adults, those at clinical risk, frontline health and social care workers, and people aged 12 to 64 who are household contacts of people who are immunosuppressed and so less able to fight off infections.

More than 120,000 people in England died last year while on the NHS waiting list for hospital treatment, figures obtained by Labour appear to show.

Denis Campbell www.theguardian.com 

That would be a record high number of such deaths, and is double the 60,000 patients who died in 2017/18.

For example, the Royal Free hospital in London said it had had 3,615 such deaths, while there were 2,888 at the Morecambe Bay trust in Cumbria and 2,039 at Leeds teaching hospitals trust.

Hospital bosses said the deaths highlighted the dangers of patients having to endure long waits for care and reflected a “decade of underinvestment” that had left the NHS with too few staff and beds.

Healthwatch England, a patient advocacy group that scrutinises NHS performance, said the number of people dying while waiting for care was “a national tragedy”.

Louise Ansari, the chief executive, said: “We know that delays to care have significant impacts on people’s lives, putting many in danger.”

Dr Emma Runswick, the British Medical Association’s deputy chair of council, said the fatalities were a “terrible indictment of this government’s mismanagement of our health services”.

Labour asked 138 health trusts how many patients had died during 2022 while they were on the NHS waiting list. Of those, 35 (25%) responded, showing that 30,611 such deaths had occurred.

Labour then extrapolated that figure to estimate that across England as a whole, 120,695 people had died while awaiting hospital care, such as a hip or knee replacement.

“Record numbers of people are spending their final months in pain and agony, waiting for treatment that never arrives,” said Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary. “The basic promise of the NHS – that it will be there for us when we need it – has been broken.”

But NHS England criticised the way Labour reached their conclusions and insisted that they were unreliable and misleading.

“This analysis, based on figures from just a quarter of hospital trusts, does not demonstrate a link between waits for elective treatment and deaths, and it would be misleading to suggest it does, given the data does not include the cause of death or any further details on the person’s age and medical conditions,” an NHS spokesperson said.

However, groups representing doctors did not raise any concerns about the accuracy of the figures. They said the deaths were closely linked to the intense pressure hospitals were under and the widespread lack of staff that was hampering the NHS’s efforts to provide timely care and cut the waiting list, which has now risen to 7.6 million people – by far the largest number on record.

“These figures are extremely worrying as waiting lists are highly likely to continue to rise, potentially reaching the 9 million predicted by [ex-health secretary] Sajid Javid. Every one of those has symptoms that may become increasingly unbearable”, said Dr Tim Cooksley, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine.

Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, said that Covid-19 would have been a factor in some of the estimated 120,695 deaths, but the key cause was the fact that the NHS has been left with far too few resources to deal with the demand it is facing.

“These figures are a stark reminder about the potential repercussions of long waits for care,” Taylor said. “They are heartbreaking for the families who will have lost loved ones and are deeply dismaying for NHS leaders who continue to do all they can in extremely difficult circumstances.”

A Royal Free London spokesperson said: “There is nothing to indicate that waiting for an elective procedure contributed to or caused the death of the patients captured in this data. A routine review of patients waiting longer than 18 weeks for treatment at the Royal Free London confirmed that none came to severe harm or died as a result of their wait.

“We have recently made significant progress in reducing waiting times and many of our services continue to run additional clinics and surgical lists during evenings and weekends so patients are seen as soon as possible. We always prioritise patients according to clinical need.”

Meanwhile, separate NHS figures showed that some hospitals have fewer beds per 1,000 people in their area than countries such as Mexico and Colombia.

Research by the House of Commons library for the Liberal Democrats showed that England has 2,233 (6%) fewer beds than it had in 2015, despite a sharp increase in patients’ need for care.

The Homerton hospital in east London has just 0.9 beds for every 1,000 local people. That is even fewer than in Mexico, which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says has the lowest number of beds per capita in the world. The Homerton has 41.4% fewer beds than eight years ago, the library found.

“This is no way to run a whelk stall, let alone a government. Instead of spreading the reassuring balm of competence, this shuffle reminds people of the chaos of last year when the Conservative Party provided a game show rather than a government, with three prime ministers and a succession of stopgap cabinet ministers – some of them, such as Shapps, holding office for only a few days in the turmoil.”

John Rentoul www.independent.co.uk

Rishi Sunak wanted a minimal reshuffle to replace Ben Wallace without fuss, so that he could project an image of competence into the new political season. Instead, by appointing Grant Shapps to his fifth cabinet role in a year, he gives the impression of the government as a TV reality show called Cabinet Musical Chairs.

Shapps was transport secretary until September last year when Liz Truss sacked him for being a Sunak supporter. Forty-three days later, she fell out with Suella Braverman and needed a home secretary to plug the gap, so she brought Shapps back into government. Shapps enjoyed the great office of state for six days before Sunak became prime minister and restored Braverman to the Home Office in a cynical operation to buy off the anti-immigration Conservative right.

Shapps was business secretary until February this year when Sunak broke up his department and gave him one of the smaller bits, the new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

Now he is defence secretary. It looks like a consolation prize for previous slights. What is worse, it looks like yet another attempt by Sunak to manage his chronically divided party. Boris Johnson tweeted his support for Shapps’s appointment suspiciously quickly, making it look as if the promotion of a Ukraine-war enthusiast was designed to keep Boris on board the pre-election Tory bus.

This is no way to run a whelk stall, let alone a government. Instead of spreading the reassuring balm of competence, this shuffle reminds people of the chaos of last year when the Conservative Party provided a game show rather than a government, with three prime ministers and a succession of stopgap cabinet ministers – some of them, such as Shapps, holding office for only a few days in the turmoil.

There was nothing Sunak could do about Wallace’s departure. The defence secretary obviously wanted to get out, having pre-announced his desire to leave after saying he wouldn’t be standing again as an MP. Something about wanting to “invest in the parts of life that I have neglected”, he said in his resignation letter. But he had been defence secretary for four years, which is a long stint in a revolving-door government, and he looked the part of an old soldier, which is what he is – captain of the Scots Guards, mentioned in despatches (Belfast).

And you can see the case for Shapps as his replacement. One of the government’s best communicators, he was highly effective during the pandemic in explaining some of the trade-offs in lockdown decisions in plain language. Wallace has done the hard negotiating over the defence budget, with Sunak when Sunak was chancellor, and it is not unreasonable for the prime minister to appoint someone totally committed to support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. Just because Boris Johnson is pleased doesn’t mean it is a bad idea to underline Britain’s resolute position, at a time when people might suspect Sunak’s rationalist Treasury brain to be wondering how much it is all going to cost.

But the trouble is that Shapps looks like a winner of a tombola of trivialisation.

It turned out that it was indeed a minimalist shuffle: Shapps to defence, Claire Coutinho to energy, and David Johnston, an unknown backbencher of the 2019 intake, to her post as a junior minister in the education department.

Coutinho’s promotion is a striking one – the shock of it concealed somewhat by the Shapps merry-go-round. She, too, only came into parliament in 2019, making hers an even faster promotion to cabinet than Sunak’s own. Resentment will be generated. Even more than the usual problem with which Abraham Lincoln was familiar: “To remove a man is very easy, but when I go to fill his place, there are 20 applicants, and of these I must make 19 enemies.”

Perhaps Sunak decided that if he were going to make enemies, he might as well go all out. Coutinho has been plucked, as he was, from the lowest level of ministerial life, parliamentary under secretary of state, and put straight into the cabinet, leapfrogging middle-ranking ministers. She is also close to Sunak politically, having been his special adviser when he was chief secretary to the Treasury, and then she was, as an MP, his unpaid ministerial aide when he was chancellor.

Sunak must have a high opinion of her ability because the energy brief is a difficult one in normal times – and a make-or-break one over the next year. Sunak is trying to scare the voters by presenting Labour’s climate-change policies as “eco-zealotry”, contrasting them with his own “proportionate and pragmatic” approach to net zero.

Yet Sunak and Coutinho will struggle to get that message across against the impression, accentuated by this reshuffle, of a dying government in which cabinet jobs related to national security – defence, the Home Office – are traded for reasons of party management and election propaganda.

Problem known for years,

National Audit Office report warned over two months ago that the risk of injury or death from a school building collapse as “very likely and critical”.

More crisis management from the Government. – Owl

www.building.co.uk 

Report in June found lightweight reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete could be present in more than 500 schools

The government has told schools to immediately shut buildings constructed with a form of outdated lightweight concrete unless safety measures are in place.

More than 100 schools built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) have been contacted so far, the BBC has reported.

The decision, announced just days before the start of the new school year, followed “new evidence about RAAC”, education secretary Gillian Keegan told the broadcaster.

RAAC was used in system build projects across a range of sectors, including hospitals, between the 1950s and the 1990s but has a design life of around 30 years.

Guidance issued by the Department for Education (DfE) today advised schools to vacate and restrict all spaces confirmed to contain the material

The department said that the spaces should “remain out of use until appropriate mitigations are in place, even where they would have been deemed ‘non-critical’ previously”.

It comes more than two months after a National Audit Office report warned that the risk of injury or death from a school building collapse as “very likely and critical”.

The report said the DfE had identified 572 schools where RAAC might be present and that it had been confirmed in 65 buildings, 24 of which required immediate action.

Although the NAO said the DfE had made progress in the last year, it warned the department still “lacks comprehensive information” on the extent and the severity of safety issues which would allow it to develop a longer term mitigation plan.

Keegan said: “We must take a cautious approach because that is the right thing to do for both pupils and staff,” she said.

“The plan we have set out will minimise the impact on pupil learning and provide schools with the right funding and support they need to put mitigations in place to deal with RAAC.”

RAAC is causing increasing concern across the public sector. In June, the government ordered all departments to investigate their estates to identify where it might be present.

In May, the Ministry of Defence revealed it was investigating hundreds of buildings feared to be on the verge of collapse because they were built with the concrete.

Health minister Maria Caulfield also admitted last year that 34 hospital buildings in England were at risk, a situation which was described by the boss of one affected hospital boss as a “ticking time bomb”.