Kevin Fong, Charlotte Summers, and Tim Cook unpick arguments that the NHS was not overwhelmed by covid-19, highlighting its legacy effects on healthcare and lessons for future health crises
During the UK’s covid-19 inquiry we have heard that “there was an inbuilt reluctance to accept that it was possible to get to a point where the NHS was overwhelmed” and that NHS capacity was regarded as “elastic.”1 The question of whether the NHS was overwhelmed during the covid-19 pandemic has become an important point of debate. Some commentators continue to suggest that the NHS prepared for a surge in admissions that did not threaten NHS capacity and unnecessarily suspended services.234
These comments either misunderstand or misrepresent the nature of the threat, the NHS response to covid-19, and the concept of capacity in healthcare services. NHS capacity is a complex property of a complex sociotechnical system; it cannot be described through simple numerical counts of bed spaces, oc