The British occupational safety regulator has refused to investigate reports from NHS trusts that 10 front-line workers have died as a result of Covid-19 infection during the pandemic.
The Executive Director of Health and Safety (HSE) declined to investigate at least 89 dangerous incidents that the NHS’s confidence said involved health workers exposed to Covid, including 10 deaths.
The position taken by the HSE, which monitors health and safety at work and can lead to prosecution, is revealed in the Pharmaceutical Journal’s requests for freedom of information. This has raised concerns that the regulator is too strict in its definition of workplace harm.
He found that 173 trusts in England had submitted at least 6,007 reports of exposure of Covid-19 employees in the course of their obligations to the HSE between 30 January 2020 and 11 March 2022, according to the provisions on injury reporting , diseases and dangerous events (RIDOR).
These include 213 ‘dangerous events’, which are incidents that have the potential to cause significant harm; 5753 cases in which an employee caught Covid-19; and 41 deaths among people who were exposed to the disease at work.
However, the HSE declined to investigate five Covid deaths reported under the RIDDOR scheme by the Yorkshire ambulance (YAS) because it believed there was a lack of evidence.
The YAS response to the Pharmaceutical Journal states that “HSE claims that occupational exposure to Covid-19 cannot be clearly linked to the workplace, as cases in the community are also widespread at the time.”
The regulator also decided not to deal with the Covid deaths of five employees at the University College London acute trust hospital, despite the trust’s belief that he had been hired. “The HSE found that there was no reasonable evidence that the infection had been contracted at work,” a spokesman for the trust said.
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Shelley Asquith, a health, safety and welfare officer for the Congress of Trade Unions, said the HSE’s decisions and said the lack of evidence was “really worrying”. This implies a continuing “element of Covid denial that is carried in the air and it is not possible to determine exactly where someone has been exposed after being in the air,” she added.
Prof. Raymond Agius, co-chair of the Occupational Medicine Committee of the British Medical Association, said: “HSE’s threshold for reporting to RIDDOR, as shown by the HSE guidelines and its correspondence with employers [trusts], is too high. It does not take into account the increased risk faced by health and care staff simply by sharing the same environment as patients, even if they do not directly treat clinically those who are known to be Covid-positive. “
An HSE spokesman said that while “the pandemic was a challenge for all concerned”, it was important that RIDDOR’s reports were based on “accurate information on workplace exposure and risk”.
Although during the pandemic he insisted that trusts report on the basis of “reasonable evidence” that the infection was work-related, “this does not mean that we have discouraged reporting,” they added.
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