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Today’s six-month government plan to live with Covid-19 is inextricably linked to a second plan to be released later this week. The only thing that the health service does not lack are plans.
The HSE Winter Plan, scheduled for Thursday, is receiving € 600 million in new financing, we are told, to protect services through next March.
So presumably that means no money is being diverted from existing services that are on hold or that cannot be delivered at the same scale as planned due to Covid-19.
Almost seven months after this crisis, people are promised additional hospital beds, more hours of home care, community assessment centers for people with respiratory illnesses to keep them out of the hospital, as well as a free flu vaccination program. broader for people at risk. . There will also be more access to diagnostics for GPs.
Many of these items are familiar parts of previous Winter Plans, however, we have been told that this year’s Winter Plan will be unlike any other. In many ways, that has to be the case, given the nature of the pandemic. We’ll get a better idea of that statement when we look at the details of the plan.
People will want a document with clear details, purposes and objectives, something that can be easily assimilated and tested for performance.
Today, the government also said that several thousand people are being recruited to help operate the test-and-trace system and winterize the country.
The World Health Organization has often repeated the mantra of try, try and test as critical to chasing the coronavirus. The real test of these new plans will be whether they offer a fast and efficient test and trace system to handle what’s coming.
In reality, the service has had six months to put in place a permanent test and trace system, which can cope with the required capacity and offer fast response times.
Likewise, the healthcare system has had six months to put beds, staff and facilities in place to deal with the pressures that will inevitably come with Covid-19 and not Covid-19 care this winter.
Some people may wonder why plans for these things are only being released now, in the seventh month of the crisis here, and why all these measures are not in place yet.
Surely health officials would argue that they had to plan for it. ‘Plan’ is the word of the day.
The health service is not alien to health plans and policies. It is the fulfillment of commitments that probably matters the most, rather than the well-intentioned words on a page.
The background to the latest plan is overcrowding in hospitals increasing again, hospital waiting lists at record levels, and the possibility of a second wave of Covid-19.
One of the problems emerging from today’s Government plan is the future role of the National Public Health Emergency Team. We have been told that it is still key to providing public health advice, but its advice will be reviewed by an oversight group.
The process by which a county will move to a higher level of restrictions or fall to a lower level is a bit confusing.
NPHET meets again on Thursday. You can give additional advice to the government (through the Oversight Group) in Dublin or other counties with high virus rates.
Under today’s plan, you will compare the data against a set of criteria to do this. Dublin could potentially move to another level in a few days if things deteriorate further.
The coronavirus loves confusion, disunity, and a lack of direction to help it circulate.
People will decide for themselves whether today’s long-heralded document has laid out the way forward with the necessary clarity.
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