Well, Jack, it's the first podcast of For the Many for 2018. Happy New Year. How's it gone so far for you?

Happy New Year to you, Ian. Well, you know, I chair two NHS Trust. So it's been a pretty tough start to the year.

Not so much for me, but for the people who are, you know, struggling away in our emergency department and trying to get people home when

they're better. But, you know, never mind because the Prime Minister has apologised, so everything

will now be okay. Is it just down to money though? Because I'm never really sure that I buy this

argument that it is all about money. In every country in the world, hospitals are much busier at this time

of the year than they have been before. We've got 190% increase in the case, in cases of

flu where people go to hospital. Could all of that have been foreseen? We can always foresee that

there are pressures over winter. And whilst the government made a bit of additional money available they did it very late on in the day so that even you know had there been the staff out

there to employ which incidentally there aren't or had there been the extra capacity to buy it would

have been too late to do it it is part it is significantly about money overall in the system, though.

You know, remember, we are one of the lowest per capita funders of our health system,

and we still have a health system, which generally is more accessible and better quality

than almost every other developed country.

But you can't carry on getting your healthcare on the cheap, particularly when

you've got a big demand of people getting older, having a range of different conditions when

they come into hospital. And those tend to be the people that are coming to the emergency

department. You know, this is not people, you know, of course you get some people who shouldn't

be there, but this is largely older people with respiratory problems who are going to have to be admitted to hospital and then who may well need considerable care afterwards in order to be able to leave hospital. And it's both at that front door and back door that there are blockages.

You were a health minister, weren't you, early on in your career? I don't know

whether you were a health minister when the decision was made to axe so many beds, because that

was under the Labour government, and we do have fewer beds in proportion to the population

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