The end of Public Health England?

Health secretary Matt Hancock will announce this week that Public Health England (PHE) will be replaced by a new agency tasked with protecting the country from pandemics, according to media reports.

The Sunday Telegraph is claiming that the new body, which might be called the National Institute for Health Protection, will mirror Germany's Robert Koch Institute and is to include NHS test and trace under its scope.

The move has reportedly been spurred by political dissatisfaction with PHE's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including testing and the way deaths are counted, but some experts fear that it constitutes a political move to find a scapegoat for the government's own failings.

“PHE employs some of the best, brightest and most hardworking clinicians and experts we have. There are simply not enough of them, which can partly be explained by the steady reduction in funding over the last seven years. Perhaps we do need a more joined-up structure, but we should not scapegoat PHE for the failures in the system in which they are but one cog,” said Prof Sir Simon Wessely, president of the Royal Society of Medicine and a former government adviser, as reported by the Guardian.

“Whilst it might be convenient to seek to blame PHE’s leadership team, it is important that the government reflects on its responsibilities as well,” noted Chris Hopson, chief executive of the hospital body NHS Providers.

“We must absolutely not allow PHE and its staff to shoulder the blame for wider failings and government decisions. With more than 1,000 new UK cases of Covid-19 being recorded for the fifth day in a row, we must seriously question whether now is the right time for undertaking such a seemingly major restructure and detract from the very immediate need to respond to the pandemic,” said Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association’s ruling council, according to the paper.

Dr Phil Hammond also took to Twitter to voice his concern over the move: “PHE is under direct control of Matt Hancock. If it has failed, he has failed. The National Institute for Health Protection is simply the Health Protection Agency we used to have before it was merged into PHE in 2002 with 40% budget cuts. Hancock will still be in charge.”