The scale and degree of adaptation that the NHS has achieved in the past six months is unprecedented in its 72 year history. The service acted swiftly to bolster its emergency preparedness and resilience and rose to the challenge with innovation, energy, and kindness. But the pandemic has exposed its fragilities.

We’ve majored on three areas where we believe leaders, decision makers and their advisors need to focus:

• The redesign of the health and care delivery model, including the integration and specialisation of services;
• Creating a more agile multidisciplinary workforce, affecting staffing, training, and leadership requirements; and
• Much greater ambition in the NHS on digitalisation, innovation, research and development, and public-private-academic partnerships.

The challenge to practitioners and policy makers alike is to build a consensus about the best practices emerging from the covid-19 response and then to execute a strategy designed to make them a permanent feature of a new NHS model.

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