We must protect our care system

Rahm Emanuel’s oft-quoted financial crash maxim about not allowing a serious crisis to go to waste has been much reprised as the world battles to see off the Covid-19 threat.

His point – that the opportunity must be grasped to forge progress that in normal times appeared impossible – certainly feels apt as we pick our way out of chaos.

Nowhere has this potential of creating a “new normal” been more clearly exposed than in health and social care provision.

Despite its place at the heart of what marks a decent, caring society, the fissures in the proud edifice of the NHS have been left untended for far too long. So too the question of how we look after an ageing population – the subject of dozens of commissions and papers and blueprints but little or no meaningful action by government.

The return of some crucial noncoronavirus health services is very welcome, along with an attempt to learn some lessons from how the sector has adapted in recent weeks.

It would be to pile tragedy on tragedy if efforts to prevent deaths being caused indirectly were given any less attention than those at the hands of the virus itself.

But our elected leaders have no less a duty to confront the longer-term picture, to debate what health and social care will look like and how it will be paid for. Otherwise we risk the future being a gradual slip back to the unsatisfactory past.

“The fissures in the proud edifice of the NHS have been left untended for far too long”