While the pandemic has without doubt placed an unprecedented strain and demand on our healthcare service, it has also presented an opportunity for rapid transformational change.
As the virus struck the UK, we witnessed medical professionals collaborating, innovating, adapting and rising to the mortal challenge with extraordinary pace and scale. A potential legacy of this otherwise bleak time could therefore be a positive and permanent change to the future ways of working and delivering care in the healthcare sector.
Although the doorstep claps have ceased, battle-weary medical staff in both primary and secondary care continue to not only contend with the virus (the highly contagious Omicron variant a reminder that we are not out of the woods yet) but also strive to meet the needs of non-COVID patients.
The NHS remains very much under siege. This is not only due to the ravages of the pandemic on the exhausted workforce, but also because of the backlog