Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

I'm delighted today to be joined by Isabel Hardman, who is launching a new podcast available by all the spectator's usual channels on the challenges facing the NHS

post-pandemic. Isabel, I feel you've really put your finger on something here, because looking at

the political landscape for the next few years, I think perhaps one of the most salient facts is that

the NHS waiting list is now 5.3 million people

long and expected to grow even longer in the coming months as more people come forward for treatment,

more people are able to get face-to-face GP appointments. Saddha Jabid, the newly appointed

health secretary, said this week that seven million people had not presented

for treatment during the pandemic. How big do you think this NHS waiting list could get?

You know, if the hospitals, if it's a kind of close run thing in terms of capacity with COVID

this summer, you know, how big a waiting list could we be looking at by the autumn?

Well, this is one of the worries is that it's not just the waiting list could we be looking at by the autumn? Well, this is one of the worries is that

it's not just the waiting list that has accumulated over the pandemic. It was also that waiting

lists were going up and getting longer before the pandemic, but also the summer crisis is

definitely happening in the NHS and that will be adding to the waiting list still further.

So people who have already been waiting for a long time, now having their operations cancelled

again by hospitals as more demand for COVID services goes up again with the rise in cases.

And obviously the link between cases and deaths has been extremely weakened, but there are still a lot of hospitalisations.

They've been going up by quite significant amounts over the past couple of weeks in particular.

And that's something that hospital chief executives are really worried about because they've got people who they've been cancelling on, you know, repeatedly or people who

they've actually brought in in the hope that they'll have an operating theatre available

and not just an operating theatre, but the necessary staff to man that theatre.

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