PRIOR to Covid, general information and international pandemic guides from WHO, ILO, NGOs and international trade unions were available in Scotland. They highlighted how best to plan and protect the public, and health care and other workers in pandemics.
By early 2020, additional information specifically on suitable personal protective equipment, aerosol and droplet exposure risks and effective ventilation in the Covid pandemic emerged and should have shaped planning.
Protecting worker health – be they health care, social care, essential or key workers – is critical to protecting public health, wider society and the economy in a pandemic. Covid spreads within workplaces and between workplaces and communities.
Scotland’s Covid inquiry ‘establishment’ phase commissioned research reports. One was to “cover only the strategic response of the devolved administration in Scotland.”
Researchers, however, had discretion to explore key events. Hindsight is wonderful but pandemic planning foresight on worker health and safety prior to and at the beginning of 2020 should have been explored in this phase.
Workplace health and safety regulation is a reserved UK matter. Nevertheless, during the pandemic, local authorities had an occupational health and safety enforcement role. The Scottish Government too produced its own Covid workplace guidance because the UK Health and Safety Executive gave the Covid lead to public health agencies.
So Covid worker health and safety was de facto devolved to the Scottish Government and its agencies and therefore merits close examination.
The inquiry’s planning and preparedness scoping research report should legitimately have looked at Covid worker health and safety under the public health umbrella. It did not.
This could potentially skew later inquiry findings. No specific mention of ‘health and safety’ and none on ‘ventilation’ appears anywhere in its report. There is one mention of a 2018 WHO checklist in its appendices indicating it was possible to look at international as well as UK literature.
A separate research portfolio was commissioned on health and social care service provision. This too neglected worker health and safety with just four very brief specific mentions of the topic and two references to ventilation in many hundreds of pages.
Occupational injury and ill-health affects many disadvantaged, marginalised, low paid workers, women and ethnic minorities disproportionately: a major inequality.
Such workers, often in essential and key jobs, in social and health care and including unpaid carers, faced great Covid risks. We still owe them a huge debt of gratitude for what they did during the pandemic.
The Scottish public inquiry as it progresses must ensure the avoidable planning failures of the public sector Covid responses to effectively protect these groups and wider society are properly investigated and not ignored.
Professor Andrew Watterson, Stirling University
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