“Inquiries must be initiated to investigate any factors that may have led to healthcare workers’ deaths. It is the next necessary step towards setting things right and preventing any more avoidable deaths.”

Doctors are stepping up a legal effort to force a public inquiry into Covid-19 deaths among NHS staff and care workers because of a lack of personal protective equipment.

Doctors Association UK (DAUK), an organisation that represents frontline medics, has escalated its threat of judicial review against the government.

At least 126 health and care workers died of Covid between April and October in cases where their employers believe they had contracted the virus as a result of their work, official reports to the Health and Safety Executive show.

One of the first was Dr Peter Tun, who died on 13 April. He had warned Royal Berkshire hospital three weeks before his death that unless it supplied the vital kit he and his colleagues needed to avoid infection “it will be too little and too late”.

DAUK, the Good Law Project and Hourglass, a charity also known as Action on Elder Abuse, say they will pursue legal action against the government’s “continued refusal to hold a public inquiry into whether PPE failures contributed to the deaths or illness of NHS staff and care workers”.

The legal action had been paused while the National Audit Office (NAO) investigated the UK’s PPE supply. Its November report demanded “a comprehensive lessons learned exercise” to understand whether “PPE provision or use might have contributed to Covid-19 infections or deaths”.

A DAUK spokesperson said: “Inquiries must be initiated to investigate any factors that may have led to healthcare workers’ deaths. It is the next necessary step towards setting things right and preventing any more avoidable deaths.”

The rest of the article can be read here.

The legal challenge is being brought by the Doctors’ Association UK (DAUK) and the Good Law Project. Nearly 200 NHS and care workers have died after becoming infected with the coronavirus.

In a pre-action legal letter to the Department of Health and Social Care, the doctors say they support the government’s efforts to mitigate the crisis caused by the pandemic but are “deeply concerned” about the “failure to procure and supply adequate PPE”.

DAUK said the deaths of healthcare workers were a “tragedy. We had a pandemic stockpile of PPE lacking essential items like full gowns and eye protection; other equipment was out of date. There has been recurrent and systemic failure of the PPE supply chain, leaving staff in some instances with makeshift or no PPE.”

The barrister Jolyon Maugham, of the Good Law Project, which aims to use the law to improve society, said: “We must never be forced to ask NHS and care home workers to risk their lives again. We must learn the lessons from recent history. And we must learn them quickly, before the second and third waves of the pandemic.”

Read more about our legal challenge here

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