The real reason clinical staff are so poorly protected

It seems also that any NHS staff have been gagged! from talking about any shortages, threatened with disciplinary etc etc .

Heard on r4 recently. There was an massive multi agency exercise about 3/4 years ago involving nhs/ police etc to check how prepared we were for any serious incidents. It revealed there were huge gaps in provision. Instead of doing something about it then, results were never reported and clearly nothing was done.

Roll on Saturday when Mr Starmer takes up his post ??

Nothing was done in response to the exercise because of "cost constraints"

Brexit was costing the UK economy an estimated £600m per week and so the government had to make a choice - fund brexit or fund the NHS.

B..... brexit won.

We will not forget this madness

Coronavirus is a worldwide calamity which a responsible government would have prepared for, and our government went through the scenario and rejected the advice because their priorities were so skewed.

B...... brexit was a self-inflicted disaster which future generations will pat dearly for.

future generations will pay dearly for this brexit madness.

Lets make this political ?

I have every sympathy with NHS staff who feel vulnerable but I also feel very sorry for checkout staff in supermarkets who have similar problems when being breahted on by hundreds of people per day.

Real heroes, all of them.

The NHS has been running on empty for years. There's no one that the government can blame except themselves. As for PHE.........

It is a political issue, Joelsnan. The NHS has been deliberately underfunded for at least the last 10 years. Most turned a blind eye. Those that tried to bring it to people's attention were called lefties, scare mongers or worse. Now that underfunding has come back to haunt us.

Vampirequeen
It has been underfunded since the 1980s at least through successive governments, much of NHS financial problems ate as a result of the disastrous Labour promoted PFI contracts that have many Health Authorities tied into contracts they cannot release which are bankrupting them.

I wasn't blaming just one Party. You'll notice I said 'at least the last 10 years'. The NHS has been undermined and underfunded for decades. It has been used as a political football by everyone from Blair's disastrous PFI to the current 'the NHS is safe with us' government who are privatising it piecemeal. The British public were so used the having an NHS that they only paid lip service to supporting it. After all it was always there when we needed it. Well now we're learning the hard way that decades of underfunding means that the NHS cannot always be there when we need it because it's been pared to the core when it needed planned spare capacity.

Becuse the NHS was known to be starved of funds, it was possible for the liars of the Leave campaign, like Boris Johnson, to fool people into believing that brexit would mean an extra £350 million a week for the NHS.

Of course it's about politics.

As far as I recall the PFI initiative started by Labour was to build new hospitals because what we had were in a dreadful state of repair, many were very old and run down. It was also a time when the waiting list was really long, 4 years or more for replacement knees, cataract surgery was similarly long and I recall a relative had no choice but to borrow the money to pay privately. These waiting lists were much reduced at that time which did make a huge difference to people, but it left us with huge debt because private initiatives are market driven and only in it for profit.
The nhs has been underfunded and undermined for many years but more especially by Conservative governments.