Interview with Matt Hancock by Katherine Grigg
Sunday 15th November, 7.30pm. I’m a third year medical student at Bristol University and I write for The Black Bag. We invited the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock to be interviewed which he kindly agreed to. The Health Secretary spoke to me from his office at home over Zoom. He managed to give me 20 minutes of his time in between finishing his red box and putting his children to bed. KG: Several wards at Southmead Hospital in Bristol where I’m on placement as a medical student have been converted into COVID wards. What health consequences do you think will come from the prioritisation of treating COVID versus other illnesses? MH: Well, I think it's a central and incredibly important question for the NHS. We know in the first peak when we didn't know as much about the disease, that there was a huge backlog of untreated patients. We are having to work our way through those. I just hope that second time round, we have much better knowledge of how to keep the NHS going for all the other patients who rely on it, whilst also obviously tackling the challenges that COVID directly throws up. I'm really proud of the fact that the NHS has kept, for instance, reducing the cancer backlog even during this second peak and protected cancer services. In fact in September - I was looking at the national figures last week - nationally the amount of cancer diagnostics was slightly higher than September the previous year - that's because of the catch-up and we've got to keep those services running. Now there's two ways to do that. One is to reduce the amount of COVID in the wider population, hence the national lockdown. The second is just for us to really think hard and creatively about how we make sure that we can get services to people who need them. I think the public understands it better the second time round as well (I don't mean to blame the public - far from it) but we've been able to successfully get out the message that the NHS is there for you, so we haven't seen the fall off in the number of people coming forward. I was worried about two consequences – firstly people who did come forward or were on a waiting list but couldn't get treated because treatments were cancelled. But then there's also the people who didn't come forward but have got health problems. This will lead to a greater burden in the future, sometimes with much worse disease - such as with late presentation of cancer or mental illness. With mental ill health we've seen some people coming forward who didn't come forward during the first peak who end up with a much more serious illness as a result.
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