England’s hospitals were within “hours” of running out of some items of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the early months of Covid-19, Matt Hancock has said.
The former health secretary told the Covid-19 inquiry some PPE was in very short supply during the first wave of the pandemic.
He also said he believes vaccines should be mandatory for NHS and social care staff in any future pandemic, while masks should be worn in hospitals from day one.
Lead counsel to the inquiry, Jacqueline Carey KC, asked Mr Hancock: “Do you accept that entering the coronavirus pandemic as we did, without a single gown, severely hampered the ability to provide safe and appropriate PPE for healthcare workers?”
Mr Hancock replied: “The stockpile that we had was not as good as it needs to be in the future, absolutely.”
Asked if England ever ran out of PPE, he said: “As a whole? No, but individual locations did.
“We came extremely close. We came within small numbers of items on a regular basis during April and May 2020 – by the second wave, we were in better shape.”
Asked about no more stock of gowns in April 2020, he said: “Gowns I think at one point we got to within six or seven hours of running out.
“We were working incredibly hard to make sure that we didn’t (run out). We nearly did.”
On the question of whether facemasks should be worn by hospital staff, visitors and workers in a future pandemic, he said: “It should be brought in immediately, and supplies need to be ready, preferably in each hospital, to make that possible.”
Furthermore, Mr Hancock said, ensuring health and social care workers are fully vaccinated is a “reasonable step that should be expected” and should be brought in to the NHS and social care at the same time.
Vaccination as a condition of deployment came into effect in November 2021 and required Care Quality Commission-registered care home staff to be fully vaccinated in order to be deployed in care homes unless medically exempt from April 2022.
Mr Hancock said he regretted that decision as social care and the NHS should have had the rule at the same time, adding: “If you are employed to care for others, then you should take reasonable steps to ensure you are not harming those in your care.
“A clinically proven vaccine is a reasonable step that should be expected.”
Earlier, Mr Hancock said he “ruffled some feathers” protecting the NHS from political “interference” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said: “Within the running of the NHS, we were protected in a way because of the independence of the NHS.
“And therefore the people being difficult for Number 10, part of my job was to provide a shield from that.
“And I know that I ruffled some feathers in doing so, but my job was, ironically, also to protect the NHS from some of that.”
Mr Hancock, who was booed by a campaigner as he arrived to give evidence, told the inquiry that interference from Number 10 caused “incredible difficulties” with regards to testing people for Covid-19.
The third module of the probe is examining the impact of the virus on healthcare systems across the four nations.
Mr Hancock was asked about his witness statements, which suggested “inappropriate political interference from Number 10”, and whether that interference applied to the scope of these hearings.
He said: “Well, of course some of it did. For instance, the biggest interference that caused difficulties was within testing, where some of the political appointees in Number 10 caused incredible difficulties.”
Mr Hancock also claimed that former first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, caused “all sorts of difficulties” as the pandemic unfolded.
At the start of the inquiry hearing on Thursday, Mr Hancock was asked whether frontline staff had been protected during the pandemic.
He said government did “everything we possibly could”, adding: “Does that mean, in a system that employs 1.4 million people in the NHS, with another around two and a half million in social care, that every decision was perfect? Of course it wasn’t.”
The former MP also defended the Stay Home, Save Lives, Protect the NHS messaging implemented during the pandemic.
Asked by if he thought the messaging had struck the right balance, Mr Hancock replied: “Yes.
“We needed to ensure that the public across the whole of the UK understood the importance of staying at home whenever possible in order to stop the spread of the virus.”
He told the inquiry that “it was literally true that if we didn’t stop the spread of the virus, then the NHS would be overwhelmed, by which I mean the system as a whole would have been unable to cope with the demand on it, as we’d seen in other countries like Italy.”
Baroness Heather Hallett, who is chairing the inquiry, asked Mr Hancock about his comments that the NHS was available to all in the pandemic according to need.
She told him that people who needed cancer screening or who needed a major surgery like a hip operation could not access the care they required.
Mr Hancock replied: “It was not safe clinically to go for some cancer treatment during the pandemic, because cancer treatment sometimes involves reducing the immune system.
“It was better to delay some non-urgent operations in order to protect both the space in the NHS and the patients themselves because, as we know, you’re more likely to catch Covid in a hospital than in almost any other setting.”
He said the “overall point is, that we did not have a collapse in the system”.
Mr Hancock resigned from his post the day after video footage emerged of him kissing his former aide, Gina Coladangelo, in his ministerial office during a time of coronavirus social-distancing restrictions.
After his dramatic exit from the front bench, he appeared on the ITV reality show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
The former health secretary was met with calls of “liar” from demonstrators as he left Dorland House after giving evidence on Thursday.
