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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Recipher and Isabel Hardman.

And it's the Department of Health that's in the news today for a variety of reasons.

First up, we have surgery ration times could be cut with specialist hubs.

Isabel, this feeds into a problem that you've written about, both for the spectator and in

your eye column, when it comes to some of the hangover from the pandemic.

Can you talk to us better?

So there's a huge backlog of elective surgery and other forms of treatment of people waiting

as a result of particularly the first lockdown where NHS services

were refocused almost entirely on COVID.

You know, anesthetists were diverted from the operating theatre to intensive care.

And even during the following waves, treatment has obviously progressed at a much slower rate or not at all in some cases than normal.

And it's worth pointing out that there were already rises in the not just the number of people on waiting lists, but also the amount of time that they were waiting.

So this was a problem before the pandemic.

The government wasn't getting to grips with, but it has obviously been, you know,

inflated enormously by COVID. And so the Royal College of Surgeons have been proposing

that there should be a network of hospital sites, of surgical hubs, to help tackle this backlog. And this is just one of the suggestions that's being

bandied around by different groups within the medical world. Some hospitals want extra funding to

create new sort of temporary operating theatres within their existing sites. And I think if you

speak to anyone from the sort of the

...