As we remain in lockdown and await our call to vaccination, a few thoughts cross my mind. Covid 19 has brought our hospitals to crisis. They are overwhelmed. There was not the spare capacity to cope with the normal winter flu surge, let alone a global pandemic. 

If we size our NHS to suit the average level of demand, then we may make it efficient, but there is no spare capacity for crisis. At the beginning of the pandemic, nightingale hospitals were built, in an amazingly short space of time. They were not used for the intended purpose, or to the intended scale.

I think the problem was that we keep hearing about hospital beds. The size of a hospital is defined by how many beds it has. So we have a looming pandemic crisis, then we need more beds. Hundreds of servicemen and women built London’s Nightingale hospital in just nine days. But you can’t train doctors and nurses in nine days, and what use is a hospital bed without doctors and nurses.

There have been stories too about retired doctors and nurses who wanted to help but were put off by red tape. They were apparently required to undergo criminal record checks, data security awareness, fire safety training and equality and diversity courses, before even administering a vaccination.

I was struck by something Joe Biden said at his inauguration. He said that more Americans had been killed by covid than had been killed in the second world war. And the analogy of fighting a war against this pandemic, and the next one struck me. I used to serve in the Royal Naval Reserve. We were paid to attend two evenings a week, some weekends, and a fortnight a year. We were trained to perform the tasks that a peacetime navy doesn’t need to, and we got quite good at it. What if we had an NHS Volunteer Reserve? I’m not of course suggesting that we can train doctors or nurses in two nights a week and a few weekends. But I do wonder if we could create a reserve force trained to do some tasks that would ease the load on nurses. That reserve force would include retired doctors and nurses, and the force would be kept up to date with all the necessary courses and certification, enabling it to swing into operation immediately.