{"id":756,"date":"2021-02-25T16:19:04","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T16:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/dauks-vice-chair-dolin-bhagawati-in-the-guardian-hancock-criticised-for-claim-there-was-never-a-national-ppe-shortage\/"},"modified":"2021-02-25T16:19:04","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T16:19:04","slug":"dauks-vice-chair-dolin-bhagawati-in-the-guardian-hancock-criticised-for-claim-there-was-never-a-national-ppe-shortage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/dauks-vice-chair-dolin-bhagawati-in-the-guardian-hancock-criticised-for-claim-there-was-never-a-national-ppe-shortage\/","title":{"rendered":"DAUK’s Vice Chair Dolin Bhagawati in The Guardian: ‘Hancock criticised for claim there was never a national PPE shortage ‘"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Matt Hancock<\/a> has been criticised for a \u201cdisgustingly disrespectful\u201d claim that there was never a national shortage of personal protective equipment during the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doctors and MPs condemned the UK health secretary as \u201cdeeply insulting\u201d on Tuesday after he insisted that his team had delivered protective equipment for frontline NHS<\/a> staff in the \u201cteeth of a pandemic\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doctors groups said they had helped deliver 45,000 masks to hospitals that lacked adequate supply at the start of the crisis and that the families of healthcare workers who lost their lives to Covid had raised concerns about the protection they received.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amid the first wave of coronavirus, NHS staff were photographed with poorly fitting PPE, with some having to make gowns themselves from bin bags.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hancock said that while there were \u201cindividual challenges in access to PPE\u201d, they \u201cnever had a national shortage, because of my team\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was addressing a\u00a0high court ruling<\/a>\u00a0over failings in publishing details of coronavirus-related contracts. He told BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today programme: \u201cThis has all been looked into in great detail. It\u2019s only because of the transparency that I support that we can ask questions about these contracts.

\u201cAnd what\u2019s more, it\u2019s easy to ask these questions, but what is hard is to deliver PPE in the teeth of a pandemic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dolin Bhagawati, from the medical campaign group Doctors\u2019 Association UK (DAUK), said Hancock\u2019s comment that the NHS did not face a national shortage of PPE during the first wave of the pandemic \u201cis disgustingly disrespectful to the memory of frontline colleagues who died from Covid-19 while raising concerns about inadequate PPE\u201d.<\/p>

He said frontline staff did not imagine having to provide their own makeshift protective equipment, \u201craising our concerns for weeks only for them to be ignored\u201d.<\/p>

DAUK delivered 45,000 masks to hospitals that lacked adequate supply. \u201cWe are not imagining mourning the colleagues that treated Covid-19 patients with inadequate PPE,\u201d Bhagawati said.<\/p>

He added: \u201cThis callous disregard for the experience of shell-shocked NHS staff in order to save political face is beneath contemptible.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the full article here: https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2021\/feb\/23\/hancock-criticised-for-claim-there-was-no-national-covid-ppe-shortage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Hancock has been criticised for a \u201cdisgustingly disrespectful\u201d claim that there was never a national shortage of personal protective equipment during the pandemic. Doctors and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,58],"tags":[185,44,38,383,47,48,70,32,33,34,35,42,114],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-protect-the-frontline","category-the-nhs","tag-bbc-radio-4","tag-covid-19","tag-dauk","tag-dr-dolin-bhagawati","tag-featured-press","tag-featured-press-covid-19","tag-matt-hancock","tag-ppe","tag-press","tag-press-covid-19","tag-protect-the-frontline","tag-the-doctors-association-uk","tag-the-guardian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dauk.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}