Sakhalin Shrimp wrote:does the NHS have it’s own procurement department to control/ monitor stocks of PPE?
The last Labour government set up a central 'emergency pandemic' store of PPE & other essential items. A pandemic was listed as the highest risk the UK faced, above terrorism & war. Unfortunately, once 'swine flu' & 'bird flu' didn't become that pandemic, government took their eye well and truly off the ball. Once set up, the structure was that as items got close to the end of their shelf life, they were supposed to be fed in to the separate, general NHS system. Instead, some items were left completely (not one needle or syringe in date) or items were fed in to the general system but not replaced.
I'm not one for bashing the government's handling of the crisis for ideological purposes, in fact, I've said elsewhere that I thought they had done a generally reasonable job. But their response to PPE was diabolical and a failure to quarantine people coming in to the UK was simply crazy.
The Isle of Man is doing reasonably well. We began mandatory quarantining in March and closed our borders a week later. As a result, we're now loosening our restrictions (groups of up to ten people can meet from Wednesday). Our number of 'live' cases is dropping and we had zero new cases again today.
Isle of Man's emergency PPE stock appears to have held up well.
In the UK, in general, normal PPE stocks would be maintained by individual Trusts I would think, but I don't know for sure.