How do you know this? What were they doing instead? Where are these baseless assertions coming from?

He doesn't
They were working
Thin air to fit his narrative

Has the waiting list for appointments and operations not grown significantly??

Now I have no idea what they were/are doing instead, but from personal experience

- a relative with cancer having his appointments/scans/treatment put off until you literally have to beg for scans and the appointment date with the consultant to be met
- to then have a scan 4 weeks prior to the appointment, then arrive at the appointment to be told by a registrar (consultant in a meeting, despite it being his normal clinic time) that the scans haven’t yet been read and someone will phone us but couldn’t say when

GP’s no longer undertaking face to face appointments without a telephone consultation first - and whilst giving a day can’t say at what point during that day they will phone. Indeed the wife’s GP surgery still has locked doors so you can’t get to reception, forms handed out through windows and any face to face appointments through a side door

Tough times for NHS workers no doubt, and especially critical care - but rest of it not covered itself in glory in my experience

Aye were working - just like teachers

It is sad, a tragedy in fact, but they had to prioritise. Which meant other things were de-prioritised - because the resource to cope with what had happened and everything as else as well doesn’t exist. It wasn’t that the oncologists weren’t working, for example, it was that many of them were assigned to managing patients with COVID-19 instead of carrying out their normal practice.

Dont make excuses for them
Theyre all just excessive waste, sat on their backsides at home, hiding behind unions because their lazy.
Slag them off without any knowledge of what goes on day to day just to fit a twisted narrative

Having read your other post I take this now as sarcasm.

Yip, they're all just lazy, part of the problem, expressive waste, lefty woke snowflakes.
(Just thought I'd join in)

Honest question because I don’t know, but what was an Oncologist/Urology/Cancer consultant- and their team - doing with COVID patients ??

Offering the best care they were able. All hands to the pump sort of thing. It’ll have been difficult even for those working in more immediately relevant areas of medicine, trying to treat patients with a new disease. But they’ll all have some useful/applicable knowledge from their training/rotations.

There’s also things like patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, etc., etc. being routinely treated with immunosuppressive therapies, and managing the additional risks associated with that, developing and implementing new treatment guidelines, which will also have created more work for oncologists, neurologists and other specialists. To be fair, I don’t know how much impact that had overall, but it was something I was quite aware from my work.

You make a good point about teams, as well. There’ll inevitably have been disruption to them and I can easily imagine that’ll have created bottlenecks, or required fewer people to each do more.

Cheers for that, clears things up with me a little, not sure it’s something that can be measured but based on all this there are going to be a lot more deaths from other causes than COVID that would have been avoided under normal circumstances

Do you know if GP’s have had similar roles because a lot of practices don’t seem to be having as many face to face or even telephone consultations- and it sounds like it’s going to be the norm rather than going back to the old ways- and things like telling my 80 year old mother the only way she can book an appointment is via an online service, of which there was not a chance of her doing that.

You think of the intellectual horsepower in the NHS - its huge some of the brightest people in this country work within it. What was the bottleneck that Covid caused that stopped the NHS functioning as normal? ICU all its capacity was used up by Covid patients. In a private company that issue would have been tackled and an alternative strategy devised and implemented pretty quickly and given cost wasn't an issue even more so. Next will be we didn't have the staff - how difficult would it have been to retrain nurses to work in ICU with Covid patients - let's face facts most of them were receiving exactly the same treatment. You could then have deployed your expert ICU nurses/doctors back to doing what they were used to everything carries on?

The idea that the whole resources of a hospital were directed towards Covid doesn't hold water - you would simply wouldn't have the room to house them all. A&E was very quiet - normal surgery non-existent through put was down 80-90% are you seriously suggesting all that excess capacity was all used up managing Covid?

On other matters - there is now a ground swell for unlocking everything earlier given the numbers - Labour want to go with the current timetable. Labour didn't want schools to go back - why because the unions didn't think it was appropriate - have we seen a huge spike since schools returned?

Brexit seems to have quietened quite a lot - to most people it has had no impact to the normality of their existence - which is what Boris told them - Starmer on the other hand said it would be armageddon which as yet hasn't happened. Labour said it was a mistake not joining the European vaccination program - how wrong he was.

Foreign aid - most people would suggest the money is better spent here at the moment - Labour just don't seem to be able to judge the mood at all.

Labour seem to be nowhere - if it was for Boris being sly and underhand with a few things Labour wouldn't have anything to say

Good grief, you've created enough straw men in that post to populate a series of Worzel Gummidge.