Winter pressures: policy versus reality

In last month's June issue of the Journal of Paramedic Practice, I discussed how something as desirable as vaccination may have far more nuanced effects against winter pressures than the simple ‘sound bite’ messages conveyed to the public (Jones, 2023a).

To elaborate, I entered the NHS in the early 1990s and, in 1993, stumbled across a massive outbreak of a previously uncharacterised infectious disease leading to a huge jump in medical admissions (Jones, 2015). At the time, no one thought to look for evidence for spatial spread and this event was sadly dismissed as evidence that the NHS was ‘inefficient’ and incapable of ‘managing demand’ (Jones, 2015). Subsequently, I have published over 100 studies on this topic, which I suspect have been dismissed as ‘how quaint, the poor fellow thinks he has discovered a new disease’.