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COMMENT BY MATTHEW TAYLOR We are under so much pressure right now that, despite being two years into this pandemic, the Government has once again been forced to deploy the Army to help out.

Health leaders are facing an unprecedented staffing crisis with nearly 40,000 currently off for Covid reasons, while hospital admissions have reached 16,000 in the UK. This rate is doubling

roughly every 12 days. The quality of patient care is at risk of being compromised at a time of rocketing demand. NHS organisations do not declare critical incidents lightly but over two

dozen have done so.  Sadly hospitals which had started to make inroads into long waiting lists have once again cancelled non-urgent operations. As the UK hits the sad milestone of over

150,000 lives lost to Covid (the real toll is almost certainly considerably higher), we must acknowledge that this virus continues to represent a substantial threat to the UK's health

and wellbeing. This is despite everything the NHS is doing to support patients ‑ with antiviral treatments and the success of the vaccination programme for example. For all the good news

about the Omicron variant being milder, we still don't fully know yet how it will impact the population at large and especially older people. There are a number of steps the Government

could potentially take right now to offer some respite. These include prioritising access to Covid tests for key workers ‑ including NHS and social care staff ‑ considering short-term

deployment of clinical students on towards and into other healthcare settings, reviewing the self-isolation period and ensuring patients can be discharged from hospital as soon as they are

medically fit to leave. In the longer term, it is surely a duty to those we have lost, and those who have been bereaved, that we build a National Health Service capable of not just

addressing the backlog of care that has built up over the past two years, but one that has the resilience to deal with future pandemic shocks and be the envy of the world once more. _Matthew

Taylor is NHS Confederation chief executive_