Our members have been at the centre of NHS efforts to respond to COVID-19 and we are also working with them to understand and respond to the challenges relating to recovering services, including addressing the backlog of care. We have surveyed our members throughout the pandemic to highlight their concerns to government and others.

Our work is now focused on

• rebuilding the NHS
• supporting our members with advice and guidance
• listening to our members to carefully monitor the impact of COVID-19.

The RCP is in close communication with UK governments and the NHS, regularly telling them how the pandemic is affecting our members. We have set out nine priorities for the resetting and rebuilding of NHS services.

We need to do things differently in the future to embed improvements and tackle health inequalities. Priorities include improving the design of services such as outpatients, tackling our ongoing workforce challenges and protected time for clinicians to engage in quality improvement, service redesign and research.