Coronavirus: Jeffrey Donaldson challenges Government to act on rate of non-Covid-19 deaths

DUP Lagan Valley MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson raised the matter yesterday during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.

Mr Donaldson said the headline in one Northern Ireland paper yesterday reported almost 180 deaths above average during lockdown of those not infected by the virus: “People who had not been attending hospital and desperately needed treatment.”

Addressing his question to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, he said: “Will the first secretary advise us of the measures that the government intend to take to address the issue and to ensure that more people are able to attend for treatment, including cancer patients?”

Cancer charities across NI have been increasingly raising concerns about the impact of delayed diagnoses and treatments.

Also this week, the UK government put out an urgent appeal for seriously ill people to attend A&E departments if they were suffering from conditions such as strokes or heart attacks, after it discovered that the numbers of people attending casualty departments across the country were dramatically down.

Mr Raab responded that Sir Jeffrey had been “absolutely right” to raise the challenges facing the NHS in dealing with wider conditions other than Covid-19.

“The chief medical officer has made it very clear: we have the capacity,” Mr Raab responded.

“The plans that we put in place and delivered through the Nightingale hospitals, the ventilators and the critical care capacity are there to deal not only with coronavirus, but with other non-Covid priorities, whether they are urgent or whether they are other forms of treatment in relation to cancer or otherwise.

“I am certainly willing to work with the health secretary and the Northern Ireland secretary to make sure that we can deal with and address any particular challenges faced in Northern Ireland.

“It is absolutely crucial as we go through this crisis that that NHS capacity is protected, and that is one of the reasons we introduced the social distancing measures and why it is important that they have been so effective.”

Also during the Commons session, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer claimed that Britain’s efforts to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline NHS workers are getting worse and not better.

He asked the government to explain how long it will take to fix the issue, as he also warned the UK looks on course for one of the worst Covid-19 death rates in Europe.

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