Britain’s occupational safety regulator declined to investigate reports of NHS confidence that 10 front-line staff members had died as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak during the pandemic.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has refused to examine at least 89 dangerous incidents that the NHS is confident involved involving health workers exposed to Covid, including 10 deaths.
The position taken by the HSE, which monitors health and safety in the workplace and can initiate prosecutions, is revealed in the Pharmaceutical Journal’s requests for freedom of information. It has raised concerns that the regulator is too strict in its definition of occupational injury.
It found that 173 trusts in England submitted at least 6,007 reports of employee exposure to Covid-19 during their HSE duties between January 30, 2020 and March 11, 2022, in accordance with the Notification of Injuries, Diseases and Hazardous Incidents (RIDDOR) Regulations.
They include 213 “dangerous events”, which are incidents that can cause significant damage; 5,753 cases in which a staff member had taken Covid-19; and 41 deaths among people who had been exposed to the disease in their workplace.
However, the HSE refused to investigate five Covid deaths reported under the RIDDOR scheme by the Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) because of what it considered a lack of evidence.
YAS’s response to the Pharmaceutical Journal said that “HSE maintained that occupational exposure to Covid-19 could not be clearly related to the workplace, as community cases were also very common at the time.”
The regulator also decided not to investigate the deaths by Covid of five members of the acute trust staff at University College London Hospital, despite the belief in the confidence that had trapped him at work. “The HSE found that there was no reasonable evidence that the infection was contracted at work,” a trusted spokesman said.
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Shelly Asquith, the head of health, safety and welfare at the Trade Union Congress, said the HSE’s decisions and said the lack of evidence was “really worrying”. He suggested an “element of continued denial about the fact that Covid was in the air and that it was not possible to necessarily identify where exactly someone was exposed once it was in the air,” he added.
Professor Raymond Agius, co-chair of the Occupational Medicine Committee of the British Medical Association, said: “The HSE threshold for RIDDOR reports, as shown by the HSE guidelines and their correspondence with employers . [trusts], is too high. It does not take into account the increased risk faced by healthcare and healthcare professionals simply by sharing the same environment as patients, even if they are not treating clinically directly those that are known to be positive for Covid. “
An HSE spokesman said that while “the pandemic was a challenge for all concerned”, it was important that RIDDOR’s reports be based on “accurate information on exposure and workplace risk”. .
Although during the pandemic he insisted that trusts submit reports based on “reasonable evidence” that the infection was work-related, “this does not mean we are discouraging reporting,” they added.