Doctors seek inquiry into coronavirus deaths among NHS staff

Doctors are stepping up a legal effort to force a public inquiry into coronavirus deaths among NHS staff and care workers because of a lack of personal protective equipment.

With at least 126 health and care workers having died of coronavirus between April and October in cases where their employers believe they had contracted the virus as a result of their work, Doctors Association UK has escalated its threat of judicial review against the government.

DAUK, the Good Law Project and Hourglass, a charity also known as Action on Elder Abuse, say they will pursue legal action against the government’s ‘continued refusal to hold a public inquiry into whether PPE failures contributed to the deaths or illness of NHS staff and care workers’. Legal action had been paused while the National Audit Office (NAO) investigated the UK’s PPE supply.

The organisations point to the case of Dr Peter Tun, who died on 13 April. He had warned Royal Berkshire hospital three weeks before his death that unless it supplied the vital kit he and his colleagues needed to avoid infection ‘it will be too little and too late’.

The director of the Good Law Project, Jolyon Maugham QC, said: “The government doesn’t want the political embarrassment of a public inquiry. The need the NAO identifies for lessons to be learned and the moral case for bereaved families of frontline healthcare workers to be heard [are] being subordinated to … political expediency. It’s morally deplorable and, we believe, legally wrong.”