Keep Britain Working – nothing to see here, just move on…

Yesterday I attended a webinar dedicated to explaining the purpose of the recent Keep Britain Working report and how the proposed action points were going to be implemented.

At the start, one of the panelists suggested that part of the reason for an increase in younger employees taking more sickness absence days was because during ‘Covid’ they had learned to stay away from work/other people if they thought they might be ill.

Not an explanation I’ve heard before and one for discussion on a different day. Although before then, how many perfectly healthy people avoided all sorts of work and social commitments by saying they ‘had tested positive for Covid’ without having to provide any evidence?

Anyway, back to the webinar.

This mention of Covid reminded me of how odd I found it that in the whole body of the Keep Britain Working report, there is not one reference to the pandemic, See this earlier post.

This prompted me to make the same observation in the webinar chat function to get some views on the subject. 

The host raised it live with the panel and their general consensus was that the report’s intention was to look forward not back and that that there were many reasons for the massive increase in sickness absence in the last few years, not just one.

In effect, what they were saying, was that there was no need for the report to reference the Covid pandemic or the measures taken.  Measures which we now know ( and many suspected at the time) had the most deleterious effect on the health of the population.  Cancelled operations, cancelled health checks, being persuaded to stay away from the NHS, delayed cancer screening, increased mental health problems due to lock down isolation, increased alcohol consumption, comfort eating, lack of exercise and fresh air, fear induced stress, covid vaccine injuries, covid itself, the list goes on.

If there was one way to Keep Britain working in the future then learning the lessons of how to manage public health in the face of a supposed virus with no worse infection fatality rate than the flu must surely be somewhere near the top. 

Whilst certain people just want to move on and try to forget about it, that very large elephant is not leaving the room any time soon.