(Richard Pohle/The Times)
Workers at one of the 19 national flu call centres. More than 1,500 people have been employed to answer calls
A parliamentary committee is set to criticise the Government’s handling of the swine flu outbreak this week, claiming that ministers were too slow to set up a national hotline to diagnose illness.
The Government launched the National Pandemic Flu Service last week, in an effort to relieve pressure on frontline health services in England.
Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, warned today that panic over the spread of the H1N1 virus could put unnecessary strain on the NHS but said that the Government’s response to the pandemic was well planned.
“It is very important for everybody to keep a sense of perspective,” he said. “If people are made unnecessarily anxious, it makes the lives of NHS professionals, who are already under enormous pressure, far more difficult as people become unduly worried.”
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But in a report to be published on Tuesday, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is expected to say that ministers failed to follow their own timetable for informing and advising the public.
More than 100,000 people in Britain are estimated to have caught swine flu in the past week alone. Around 30 people have died after contracting the H1N1 virus, and as of last week 840 people were in hospital.
But researchers have warned that Britain may suffer a shortage of critical care beds in the event of a predicted increase in cases this winter.
Sickness absence in the NHS could also limit maternity care in the coming months, it is suggested, restricting home births and planned Caesarean sections as staff are moved around the country to cope with demand.
The Science and Technology Committee had recommended in 2005 — when it was looking at a possible avian flu pandemic — that the Government should ensure that it had adequate and prompt systems for providing information to the public.
Lord Jenkin of Roding, who was asked to sit on the Committee’s flu pandemic inquiry, told The Times earlier this year that ministers had said that the hotline would be ready by April or May.
He said that a paper presented to the Lords committee at the start of the year detailed how the system would involve assessing people’s symptoms over the phone or internet, providing a code for a “flu friend” to pick up medication where appropriate.
The hotline and a website assessed more than 58,000 people’s symptoms and distributed more than 5,500 courses of antiviral drugs on its first day.
“The Government has been very slow,” Lord Jenkin, a former health secretary, said. “They have been preparing for years for this, but now there’s a pandemic on the threshold and a very vital bit is not ready to get up and running.”
A Department of Health spokesman said that it had agreed a contract with BT for the flu line in December, but Mr Burnham said that it had not needed to put it in place until the NHS was seeing “exceptional” rates of illness.
When the system went live on Thursday, at least 330 pharmacies and health centres were acting as local antiviral collection points, and this had increased to more than 1,000 yesterday.
Mr Burnham added that the H1N1 flu strain was a mild virus in the vast majority of cases, with relatively mild symptoms from which people recover fully fairly quickly.
“People should be assured that we have been planning our response to a pandemic for a long time,” he said.
David Cameron, the Conservative leader, welcomed the fact that the hotline was now up and running but warned that the number of critical care beds available was “very low compared to other countries”.