Government made one major error during covid – this is how to fix it

This year marks five years since the global outbreak of -19. During the ensuing pandemic, normal life was disrupted and millions of people around the world sadly perished. In the UK alone over 200,000 people lost their lives. But it could have been much worse.

Thanks to our high-quality healthcare system and heroic frontline workers, the case fatality rate in the UK , below the global median of 1.1% – at least according to data from John Hopkins University. But at what cost? And what lessons have we learned?

The most obvious cost has been the ballooning NHS waitlists – and the implication this has for patient outcomes. In order to tackle the pandemic, the NHS was ordered to prioritise -19, to the detriment of other kinds of care.

of the NHS backlog shows that since the beginning of the pandemic, the elective care waiting list has gone from 4.5 million to over 7 million. The number of people waiting for emergency admissions for over 4 hours has also skyrocketed.

In fact, in January 2025, 61,000 patients waited over 12 hours for admission. In January 2020 that figure was just under 3,000. As a result, I expect that we will see the number of avoidable deaths dramatically increase in the near future.

Aside from the fact that elective care had been completely sidelined during the pandemic, one of the reasons why wait times are so high is because the NHS has long suffered from staff shortages.

This issue of course predated the pandemic but will have certainly meant that as -19 spread throughout the country, our healthcare workers were under more pressure than they should have been. It also means that tackling the backlog is taking longer than it should.

This brings me to one of the main lessons from the pandemic: workforce planning. Indeed, capacity issues caused by staff shortages has been the result of – at least in part – poor or ineffective workforce planning spanning decades.

When I was health secretary, I discovered firsthand that recruitment targets require more than just increasing the amount of flow from medical schools. As was the case when I tried to recruit 5,000 new GPs by 2015.

Despite our best efforts, we did not anticipate an increase in the number of GPs choosing to work part-time after finishing their studies.

In addition to this, it also takes years to train healthcare professionals, which is why planning for the long term is so important.

For example, despite increasing the number of medical training places available each year by 1,500 starting September 2018, by the time -19 arrived in the UK in 2020, none of these extra doctors would have finished training yet.

We must keep this in mind when planning for the next pandemic.

When I was chancellor, I drew on the valuable experience I gained as health secretary to push through the NHS’s . It is my sincere hope that this action will help make sure our capacity to handle another pandemic will be much greater in the future.

Workforce planning aside, another important lesson that must be learned is how we approach pandemic planning. Previously, groupthink dominated the process, and this led to us preparing for a flu pandemic instead of .

This is because it was our shared belief that a flu pandemic was far more likely and thus over focussed on it. We seriously need to diversify our expertise and encourage contrarian viewpoints when considering our health security in the future.

Including learning lessons from other countries, such as those in Asia. Better organisational transparency and less hierarchy would also not go amiss. This would hopefully result in all possible scenarios being considered and planned for.

So as we mark this anniversary, let us not just look to the past for answers. We also need to look to the future and make sure that whatever the next pandemic is, we are able to tackle it head on without having to also sacrifice the rest of our healthcare system.