Jeremy Hunt says he regrets not acting earlier to expand numbers of doctors and nurses during his time as health secretary.
In a frank interview with the BMJ, Hunt, who ran the NHS for six years from 2012 to 2018, says workforce planning needs urgent reform, and calls on the government to publish figures on staff requirements each year.
“If you don’t plan for the NHS workforce strategically, it ends up costing the taxpayer much more because the NHS then ends up recruiting locum doctors and agency nurses who are much more expensive,” he says.
“We’ve really been on the back foot from the start on test and trace, and in some ways it dates back to the period when I was health secretary,” he says.
“It’s why there is this stark difference in the effectiveness of our responses compared with countries in East Asia,” he says.
He believes the UK’s biggest mistakes were around discharging patients who were COVID positive into care homes.
Hunt supports the call for a public inquiry into the UK’s handling of the pandemic, though not until the pandemic is under control. And he insists that any inquiry should consider successes, such as vaccine development and distribution, as well as failings.
“We have had probably the most effective vaccination programme anywhere in the world, in terms of the speed of approving and distributing vaccines [in the UK], but also... this is the country that developed one of the vaccines that has been approved for use,” he says. “The UK has punched well above its weight in terms of helping the world find a solution to this terrible nightmare.”
