Scotland “ironically” stalled on long-running plans to improve PPE distribution just as Covid reached the UK because staff had been diverted to deal with other aspects of the emerging pandemic, the country’s former chief medical officer (CMO) has admitted.
Giving evidence to the UK’s Covid inquiry, Dr Catherine Calderwood said not all recommendations produced by a pandemic planning exercise in 2018 had been carried out by the time Covid made landfall two years later.
When asked which of the 13 recommendations that came out of Exercise Iris, a 2018 trial by the Scottish government’s Health Protection Division, were not implemented, Calderwood said “the most important” related to sending information to Scottish health boards about PPE, including its distribution and the fitting of FFP-3 masks for health workers that were needed to safely treat patients.
