FEMHO attends public consultation on Covid-19 Inquiry

By Ade Adeyemi, FEMHO Secretary The UK Covid-19 Inquiry is running a public consultation on its draft Terms of Reference (“TOR”), which will close this week on Thursday, April 7. The TOR , sets out what matters the Inquiry will investigate in the Covid-19 Inquiry. Anyone can take part in the online consultation and we encourage you all to write in and have your say. FEMHO is very pleased to have been invited to an in-person consultation on the TOR, which I attended on Wednesday 30th March. Being invited to a special consultation for unions and organizations focused on frontline and healthcare workers is a mark of the important role FEMHO has to play in the Inquiry and the critical voice we have in shining light on the impacts of Covid-19 on BAME communities. Getting a seat at the table It was a hybrid meeting (online and in-person attendance) for which the handling and management of, was very professional and well thought through. Competent people are behind this set up process and they certainly have the resources to make this work well. Again, it is worth stressing FEMHO has done incredibly well to get itself a seat at this table, amongst the countries’ biggest and most recognised unions. Highlighting our concerns It is widely known that ethnic minority health and social care sector workers are overrepresented in frontline roles and underrepresented at the level of senior management, both within the NHS and across other spaces in health and social care. The mortality rate among ethnic minority workers was disproportionately high and was especially evident in the first stage of the pandemic. These were issues that we knew we needed to highlight and ensure would be reflected in the TOR. The feedback that we shared directly will help shape the final TOR for the Inquiry and inform how the Inquiry goes about its work. For example, we believe the inquiry should first look: at what was known; what risks existed at the outset of the pandemic and how prepared we were to deal with those risks. Within this discussion, the other unions and organisations spoke only to issues relevant to their members’ profession and interests, underlying the importance of FEMHO’s involvement in the inquiry. No other stakeholder spoke about looking into racial disparities, for example, we argued about investigating at what stage in the pandemic it became apparent that ethnic minority communities were being disproportionately adversely affected, in terms of deaths and hospitalisations and wider impacts e.g. access to PPE and PPE fit with religious/cultural dress. Learning lessons Another area of feedback was that important lessons from the pandemic can be applied more broadly and not just to the preparation of future pandemics (which is the current scope of the TOR). There are applications and lessons to be learnt more broadly, ones that could be applied across health, social care sector roles. It will be crucial that the success and/or failure of steps taken throughout the pandemic is investigated along with a review of what alternatives could and should have been pursued such that lessons can properly be learned and applied to as wide an area of health and social care as possible. Full participation There was broad consensus on ensuring that people should be allowed to fully participate in the Inquiry and that Core Participants (individuals and organisations invited to play an active role in the Inquiry) must be allowed to fully participate and ask questions through their recognised legal representatives (“RLRs”) as opposed to everything being channelled through and asked by Counsel to the Inquiry. Everyone agreed that the Inquiry should be designed and run to ensure accessibility and that as many people as possible have their voices heard. Once the public consultation has ended, the Chair will consider our view on the draft TOR and the views of everyone else that has engaged, before sending them to the Prime Minister for final approval. This will be done as quickly as possible, so the Inquiry can begin its work. We look forward to engaging more with this process.