UK “woefully ill-prepared" for pandemic and its effect on blind and partially sighted people, RNIB says

The UK COVID-19 Inquiry’s first report shows that the UK was not prepared for the pandemic or the effect it would have on blind and partially sighted people, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) has said.

The Module 1: the resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom report “highlights how woefully ill-prepared the UK was for the Covid-19 pandemic, and indeed any type of pandemic,” Matt Stringer, chief executive officer at RNIB, said.

“In RNIB’s view, this is particularly true with regards to the rights and needs of blind and partially sighted people,” Stringer added.

He noted that the report “has shown how official contingency planning didn’t adequately consider the needs of vulnerable people, including disabled people, when responding to a pandemic, or mitigate the disproportionate impact that the virus itself might have on disabled people.”

The lack of preparation was not just the result of a new and unknown virus but was also systemic, “with clear failures from government to learn or act on the experience of previous virus outbreaks when the accessibility of communications for blind and partially sighted people was raised as a concern,” Stringer said.

COVID-19 inquiry: lessons for the future

The report was published on 18 July. It is the first in a series that will examine the UK’s response to and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key takeaways from the report include an admission that the UK was not prepared for a global pandemic, that the existing approach to risk assessment was flawed, that the government’s existing pandemic strategy, developed in 2011, was not flexible enough to adapt when faced with the pandemic in 2020, and that emergency planning failed to put enough consideration into existing health and social inequalities.

Advisers lacked autonomy to express differing opinions and their advice was often undermined by ‘groupthink,’ the report said.

“If we had been better prepared, we could have avoided some of the massive financial, economic and human cost of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report’s summary concluded.

Recommendations put forward include a “new UK-wide approach to the development of strategy, which learns lessons from the past and from regular civil emergency exercises, and takes proper account of existing inequalities and vulnerabilities,” and “better systems of data collection and sharing in advance of future pandemics.”

The report also advises "bringing in external expertise from outside government and the Civil Service to challenge and guard against the known problem of groupthink.”

Its publication “provides a hugely important opportunity for critical lessons to be learned to inform the UK’s response to future national crises,” Stringer believes.

Stringer emphasised that the introduction of the NHS Accessible Information Standard, in 2016, requires health and care bodies to ensure blind and partially sighted people receive communications in a format that they can read.

Despite this, blind and partially sighted people “still received shielding letters they could not read throughout 2020,” he said, adding: “This was unacceptable, and yet we are yet to be convinced that would not happen again in the event of a future emergency.”

Office of National Statistics data has shown that in some age groups blind and partially sighted people were 40% more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population, Stringer said.

He added that “four years on, we’re still waiting for research to find out why this was, and how this increased risk could be prevented in future pandemics.”

Stringer advised the UK government and devolved administrations to implement the recommendations put forward by the report “at pace.”

“It’s also vital that they urgently improve their understanding of the effects of sensory loss and account for this in policymaking and future pandemic readiness planning,” he said.

"Never again must decisions affecting all aspects of people’s daily lives be made without involving blind and partially sighted and disabled people from the very start.”