Aftershock: The NHS

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2021

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Building Back is a limited series by award winning journalist Isabel Hardman. In every episode she asks how we can fix the damage caused by the pandemic to a different part of British society.

In this episode, Isabel talks to those working front line in the NHS and the politicians in Westminster who decide its future.

Featuring: Head of the independent health think tank, The Kings Fund Richard Murray; Sri Kalidindi, a psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust; breast surgeon Julie Doughty; chair of the Health and Care Women Leaders Network Sam Allen; Jeremy Hunt, who was the longest-serving health secretary, and now chair of the Commons health select committee; Chris Hopson chief executive of NHS Providers; and Rob Findlay, an expert on waiting lists at Insource Ltd.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Aftershock, a new series of podcasts from The Spectator on Life After the Pandemic, with me, Isabel Hardman.
0:08.4	In each episode, we will look at a different issue, from the NHS to schools, mental health, and how our towns are changing now more people are working remotely.
0:17.6	I'm going to speak to experts, people on the front line and those most affected by the issues covered,
0:23.6	and we'll try to come up with some solutions to the damage raw by COVID.
0:28.4	I do hope you enjoy listening. Last year, politicians promised to protect the NHS.
0:45.3	The new NHS COVID-19 app that we're launching today will help people to protect themselves,
0:53.3	to protect their loved ones and to protect the wider
0:56.0	community. We can protect our NHS. Protect the NHS. Protect the NHS. Protect the NHS and save lives.
1:04.0	But now the health service is under greater pressure than ever before. There's a backlog of treatment
1:09.4	with waiting lists soaring both in terms of the number
1:12.0	of people on them, more than five million, and the length of time they are waiting to get the
1:16.8	treatment they need. You see, while the NHS didn't collapse under the strain of COVID patients,
1:22.3	thanks to the restrictions repeatedly imposed on the population, it has not come through the pandemic unscathed by any means.
1:30.3	I'm Isabel Harbman and in this podcast, the first in a new series looking at the challenges for
1:34.8	Britain after the pandemic, I'll be asking whether the NHS can recover from its own version
1:40.9	of long COVID, long waiting lists, burnt out staff and crumbling hospital buildings.
1:47.0	So how big is the scale of this treatment backlog?
1:51.0	To find out more, I spoke to Richard Murray, head of the Independent Health think tank, the King's Fund.
1:57.0	Richard, what sort of state is the NHS in as it starts to emerge from this pandemic?
2:04.7	So the pandemic has been a really seismic shock to the service in almost anything that it does.
2:13.1	So we saw waiting times now lifting up, but there is an enormous drop-off in the number of people
2:18.4	being treated last year and in the number of people being referred for treatment. I think what we're
	...

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