Sir Andrew Goddard has been named on the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.
01 June 2022
One of the country’s most senior doctors said his knighthood is a recognition of the work of physicians during the coronavirus pandemic.
Sir Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), has been named on the Queen’s Birthday Honours list.
The 54-year-old from Derby is the first RCP president to continue carrying out clinical work and be on call at weekends.
Speaking about his knighthood, given for services to health and social care, Sir Andrew said he feels happiness and pride but wonders if there are people more deserving.
“It’s a very weird feeling but I’m really, really humbled by it,” he told the PA news agency, adding: “I think it’s as much of a recognition of all the other physicians that did stuff during the pandemic.”
He said he is “lucky” to lead the college and hopes his honour is a reflection of what doctors as a whole have done to tackle Covid.
Sir Andrew said 95% of Covid-19 patients admitted to hospitals were looked after by physicians on wards, adding: “The physician effort, if you like, during the pandemic, sort of went under the radar.”
He spoke of his pride in his colleagues and thanked them for their support.
Asked what three things he would like to see done immediately to support the NHS, Sir Andrew called for a public acknowledgement of the importance of primary care, a clear workforce plan and a focus on social care.
While the UK is “in a good place” regarding Covid, he added: “I would certainly never say that it’s over and I would never forget its potential to cause a huge amount of disruption.
“And remember that it is still killing people and there are still families that are losing people.
“Having lost friends, I hope I would never forget that.”
In February, the health service published its “elective recovery plan” which set out how it intends to tackle backlogs caused by the pandemic.
Asked if he thinks the NHS will meet its aims or whether workforce issues will prove too problematic, Sir Andrew said: “I think that one of the challenges that is going to limit our ability to do that will be trying to manage the urgent and emergency care stuff at the moment.
“So you’re seeing waits in A&E departments going up and up, and there is this conflict because the same workforce are the people who look after patients coming into the front door of the hospital as need to do the elective backlog stuff.
“I think that’s going to be one of the big tensions.
“A lot of that has to do with lack of ability to get patients out of hospital, to discharge, and the state that our social care is in.
“So I think that the targets that have been set for the elective backlog are ambitious, if I can put it like that.
“And I think that it will require a lot of hard work and there are a lot of barriers in the way in order to meet them.
“I think it is potentially achievable but I am under no illusions that it’ll be extraordinarily hard to do it, if I can use that phrase, simply because that tension between urgent emergency care and elective care, and you’ve only got one workforce to do it.”
Sir Andrew said that if he could have “one Christmas wish” it would be that people took a “more than one electoral cycle view” about how to manage the NHS and social care and instead had a “much more long-term view”.
He said the problem of workforce issues is not due to any one government but is down to a succession of governments and a “lack of foresight”.
Sir Andrew said: “I think when it comes to thinking about long-term funding for the NHS and for social care, the problems we have are related to long-term planning.
“And at the end of the day, it’s what the Treasury will allow. I have worked with many secretaries of state for health and social care over the years and I think each of them are very committed to the NHS.
“They may come from a position where they don’t know much about it, but once they’ve spent time working with it they will passionately campaign for it.
“The problem is that every health secretary has to fight with every other state secretary and that is the challenge.”
Sir Andrew said he has been called by the nickname “Bod” since childhood and predicts that colleagues will go down the “tongue-in-cheek” route of calling him “Sir Bod”.
