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I’m taking my health seriously this winter – here’s why we all should

In the midst of the NHS winter crisis, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer speaks openly for the first time about her health in a bid to promote a cultural shift in how we approach sickness and wellbeing

Monday 13 January 2025 18:06 GMT
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This month, I’m going for a chest X-ray and a blood test. It’s probably nothing to worry about. But for a long time, colds have always hit me much harder than they hit most other people, usually flooring me for weeks. So, after years of trying to be very British and stiff-upper-lipped about it all, I am finally getting it checked out.

I felt pretty nervous putting this in writing for everyone to read. So why am I doing it? Because I think it’s time we, as Brits, take a look at our culture around health and sickness.

We have a culture that says everyone should basically pretend to be physically infallible – an impossibly high standard that we are all guaranteed to fail.

Admitting you are ever unwell (let alone frequently unwell) is admitting that you are weak not only physically, but somehow morally too.

Staying away from the office for a few days to avoid making your colleagues sick – an act that should be seen as considerate – is often seen as selfish. Wearing a mask in public spaces when you’re unwell to protect others is scoffed at. And if you’re a politician or other public figure, I’ve learned the hard way that sending apologies because you’re unwell too often creates a whirlwind of speculation about what’s really wrong with you – or if you’re just making excuses.

And I’m able-bodied – so my experience of sometimes needing to take time off sick and finding that it’s not really acceptable, or simply not possible, is the tip of the iceberg compared to what many disabled people face every day when it comes to requesting adjustments, flexible working, or just being constantly on the receiving end of other people’s judgements.

For a while, the Covid pandemic taught us to treat health and sickness differently. We valued – and paid! – people to self-isolate when they were ill to protect others. We encouraged each other to rest and recover. We made changes to public spaces to reduce the risk of transmission.

Although the government didn’t go nearly far enough to protect us from the virus, the measures they did put in place showed that there was a different way of doing things.

Now, none of us want to go back to the isolation of lockdowns and not being able to hug our mates. But when it lifted those unpleasant temporary restrictions, the government missed an opportunity to hang on to the parts that had the potential to make us all happier and healthier. And the new Labour government – all too happy to leave the pandemic in the past – has chosen not to rock the boat with new measures to take care of our health.

But rather than going back to a status quo that took for granted that many of us get sick every year, and that when we do we should just push through and risk infecting those around us, we could have taken our health more seriously as a country – and done much more to protect people from Covid and other viruses in the future.

This is crucial, not least as our NHS faces serious winter pressure. As some wards report facing “pandemic-level” strain, we need to be funding our health service properly – but we also need to take prevention seriously.

From improving air quality in public indoor spaces, such as schools, hospitals, public transport and workplaces, to restoring free lateral flow testing, there are so many ways to prevent viruses from spreading in the way that we take for granted that they will.

And while the pandemic feels like it’s over for many, there are an estimated 2 million people across the UK suffering the effects of long Covid – who have been left behind by governments eager to declare the crisis over. There is much more that could be done to support research into therapeutics for long Covid – in the first instance, for example, setting up a research task force to improve understanding and treatments of after-effects, ME and chronic fatigue syndromes.

Along with these practical measures could come, I hope, a collective change in attitude. One where we all acknowledge that our squishy and imperfect bodies sometimes malfunction, we design our workplaces and HR policies with this in mind – and we remind ourselves that the sign of a civilised society is one in which we look after each other.

Carla Denyer is co-leader of the Green Party

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