Open medical school at University of Bradford to boost healthcare worker numbers in the future, says leader

Leader of Bradford Council Susan Hinchcliffe, who is campaigning to be Labour’s pick in the West Yorkshire mayoral race next year, held an in conversation event this afternoon with Professor John Wright, an epidemiologist based at the Bradford Royal Infirmary (BRI).

And both agreed opening a medical school in the city would be a positive step.

Ms Hinchcliffe said: “I’d like to see a medical school at Bradford University, and therefore, I would like Government start thinking about more doctors, more nurses, more educational psychologists, more speech and language therapists, all that needs investing in and it gets frustrating for me because I can’t see them investing for the future.”

She also conveyed her fury towards the Government over its handling of announcing the second national lockdown just days before West Yorkshire was due to go into Tier 3 restrictions.

She said: “I’ve actually been very angry at Government because I did ask them twice during that week, are we going into national lockdown, and twice they said they weren’t.”

She added: “They need to think about the whole of the country more and not just see things from a Westminster bubble, which is why I think devolution is so important because it gives strong voices in the North of England. And we really need to make sure our voices are heard in places like Westminster and that they see that the northern regions have a lot to offer.”

Prof Wright, who has worked on tackling Ebola and HIV, said there was no new method for treating coronavirus.

He said: “There’s nothing very clever unfortunately, and this is one of the frustrations about seeing what has played out over the last few months. It is about getting good isolation and infection control in hospitals - they became amplification centres in Sierra Leone, but also amplification centres here during the first wave of the pandemic - good PPE, which we really struggled with, I think everybody will know from the media stories how desperate we were in the first few weeks, and good testing. That adage from WHO ‘test, test, test’ really is quite fundamental.”

But he much of that had improved and the NHS was better equip to fight the virus this time around.

He also explained a Bradford-based group similar to the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has been studying the impact of coronavirus on the city.

The Bradford Institute for Health Research’s group found those worst affected by lockdown had been parents who reported “big increases in anxiety and depression, real concerns about economic financial insecurity, food insecurity” ahead of the second national lockdown.

Prof Wright, who is also director of the institute said there were “really desperate stories actually coming out from the people of Bradford about how difficult this is going to be.”