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).