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Highland News & Media
  • 16/02/2025
Transcript
00:00I'm Dr Tim Allison, Director of Public Health for NHS Highland.
00:03We might think about places like intensive care units which had an awful lot of difficulties
00:10and difficult decisions to make and really sick people who they're used to dealing with
00:15sick people but not quite the same. But sometimes somewhere like a care home with an outbreak and
00:25quite a few of their residents dying in a short space of time is really traumatic for everybody.
00:33We're still seeing the effects five years after the lockdown of those knock-on effects which then
00:42build up either because people were due to have operations or other investigations or procedures
00:50and they weren't able to have them and there's that knock-on effect or there was an effect of
00:56people not coming forward for diagnosis and treatment as early as they'd normally do because
01:04of all the restrictions or feeling that other things were going on whether in their lives or
01:11or around in the community and in the health service. That meant that conditions
01:17would have been more serious when people actually came to seek help. People generally did the best
01:28that they could using the information available. A lot of people within the NHS went above and beyond
01:35what would normally be expected for people in their work but then a lot of other people did
01:43as well and there were a lot of
01:50groups of people who suffered quite a lot but perhaps we don't remember that now. I just think
02:00in one group with a very high death rate was taxi drivers as just as one example. It was only about
02:08a year after we first heard of Covid that the vaccines first came out right at the end of 2020
02:16so in some ways absolutely remarkable achievement to get that out really quickly. There was no
02:25treatment at all that doesn't come with downsides. There was an anti-vax movement in the 18th century
02:36so it's nothing new. I think we are
02:46probably better equipped than pre-Covid because of coming across Covid.
02:51There have always been plans for pandemics. The plans have tended to
02:57focus on particularly on influenza because that's been seen as the biggest risk and there will be
03:06another flu pandemic sometime and there could be something else so we need to have that variety of
03:15preparation.