North East doctor hopes lessons will be learnt from the covid pandemic
The covid inquiry is currently ongoing
A North East doctor tells us that he hopes strategies will be put in place in case we have a future pandemic.
The covid inquiry is currently looking into the impact covid-19 had on the healthcare system.
It is hoped the inquiry will help prevent anything like what we saw in 2020 onwards happen again.
Dr George Rae is from the North East regional medical committee: "There has got to be a new UK wide pandemic response exercise and that's got to be taking place at least every three years. When that happens, the outcomes, the results have actually got to be published.
"The UK Government's pandemic strategy was outdated because that had been developed in 2011 and that wasn't flexible enough to be able to adapt it to the 2020 COVID pandemic.
"There was a lack of attention to the systems that would help. What people will remember, test, trace and isolate it was felt that those policy documents were overly complex when used during the covid pandemic.
"The covid inquiry, and most people are aware of the fact that there is this ongoing inquiry, lessons will have been learnt from the actual pandemic with all the scrutiny as far as what has previously happened.
"People are learning the lessons, and the good news is that a lot of work will be put into this, and it will be ongoing in the future. I think that in any future pandemic we will be infinitely more prepared than we were in 2020 when COVID-19 struck."