Boris Johnson must follow through on his Blairite commitment to the NHS

Editorial: When the vaccines kick in, government promises should be upheld. The National Health Service will require extra resources for years to come

The prime minister must do more for the NHS than just be photographed in hospitals (Reuters)

For the second time in this pandemic, the focus of government policy is to avoid the National Health Service being overwhelmed. We did not find out what that meant in April, and let us hope we do not find out this time either, although the number of coronavirus patients in hospital and the number of deaths are markedly higher now than they were then. 

But we already know that huge damage has been done to NHS capacity, and that its ability to do anything but treat the most urgent and serious illness is now severely curtailed. Shaun Lintern, our award-winning health correspondent, reported yesterday that record numbers are now waiting for treatment. By the end of November, 192,000 people had been waiting for more than a year for routine operations, with the total NHS waiting list standing at 4.5 million, which is about one in 12 of the population of England. 

This is a measure of the extent to which the NHS has been set back, just as it seemed, a year ago, that it was at last about to start to receive significant extra funding after a decade of stringency.