Health Inequalities and Covid-19

Key Points

• Growth in NHS spending slowed from 2010-2019 to 1.6%, down from an average of 3.7% each year since it began in 1948.
• The health, social care and social work sectors are large employment sectors within the UK economy, employing around 4.4 million people in 2019. They are dominated by women: 78% (3.45 million) employees in these sectors are women. However, they are hierarchically structured by gender.
• The NHS currently has a shortage of 100,000 staff (9% of all posts). The NHS needs an additional 5,000 internationally recruited nurses every year to prevent worsening staff shortages.
• 71% of EU migrants who are ‘key workers’ would not be eligible for a UK work visa under the proposed Immigration Bill. This includes essential non-medical NHS staff and social care workers.
• In the event of a no-deal Brexit, regulatory burden on medicines and medical devices could cost the NHS an additional £2.3 billion annually.
• Black Caribbean populations have the highest number of per capita hospital death from Covid-19 in the UK. Black African hospital deaths are 3.7 times higher, and Bangladeshi rates are twice as high as for white British people (accounting for age, gender and geographic profiles).

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