Covid Scotland: Healthcare cannot just 'return to normal' as pandemic enters new phase – Elsa Maishman

Tuesday marked two years since the first confirmed case of Covid in Scotland.

You’d be forgiven for not having noticed, as the crisis in Ukraine blew all other news off the agenda. This is right, not only because Ukraine demands attention, but also because the time has come for Scotland to urgently move focus to the next stage of the pandemic.

This doesn’t mean we can all forget about Covid – threats of new variants lurk in the shadows, and the disparity of vaccination in poorer countries is both a human tragedy and a risk to global health. But in Scotland our attention needs to shift – and not in the way it has been doing up to this point.

The emphasis has been on a “return to normal”, removing one restriction after another and getting back to where we were before.

However, healthcare in Scotland before 2020 wasn’t good enough, and returning to that state will be neither good enough nor possible, as the NHS groans and creaks under the strain of record high staff vacancies, exhaustion, burnout and huge care backlogs.

No one is denying the challenge of taking action, but at some point politicians will have to stop responding to every criticism with the tired line that our brave and heroic NHS is facing the most difficult period in its 73-year history.

The Scottish Government’s annual report on health inequalities made for sobering reading this week, amid fears the pandemic in general, and lockdowns in particular, have exacerbated long-standing problems.

Wide chasms were highlighted between the most and least deprived areas across the board. Relative inequalities in coronary heart disease and cancer deaths have increased over the long term, while the gap is starkest in alcohol-specific deaths.

Health Secretary Humza Yousaf visits Monklands Hospital in Airdrie (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/pool/AFP via Getty Images

It comes after a report released by Public Health Scotland a month ago showed just 55 per cent of children in the most deprived areas of Scotland had been seen by a dentist in the past two years, compared to 73 per cent in the least deprived. A day later, another report showed deprived areas were the only ones not meeting targets for bowel cancer screening.

And annual population estimates from National Records of Scotland found healthy life expectancy had fallen for both men and women. The gap between healthy life expectancy for men in the most and least deprived areas has increased to its highest level in a decade, and now stands at almost 24 years.

This is an astounding figure, and it’s no wonder independent charity the Health Foundation launched a review into health inequalities in Scotland this week, citing concern the country still has the lowest life expectancy at birth in the UK, and one of the lowest in Europe.

These problems are already well-known, and existed before the pandemic. But that is not an excuse for allowing them to continue – the opposite, in fact, health inequalities should now be at the top of the agenda on the understanding that many have become worse in the last two years.

Restrictions may be easing, but what is needed now is not the optimism of the Scottish Government looking forward to “brighter and better days ahead”, but a sense of urgency in addressing a different, but still escalating crisis.

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