The NHS is not living with covid, it’s dying from it

Today may be the most difficult day the NHS has ever experienced. The headlines will focus on the pressures created by the heatwave and that most visible sign of healthcare failure—ambulances queuing outside hospitals.1 But, as readers of The BMJ and HSJ know all too well, this brutal situation is the culmination of many factors, which include but are not limited to prolonged periods of underfunding in the past decade,2 lack of an adequate workforce plan,34 and a cowardly and shortsighted failure to undertake social care reform.5There is one more problem. Most people (including many in the NHS) are so tired of it that they are wilfully pushing it to the back of their minds, but now is the time to face the fact that the nation’s attempt to “live with covid” is the straw that is breaking the NHS’s back. In 2020 and 2021 the NHS coped with pandemic…
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