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Does the healthcare system help or hinder our health?

This chapter examines the problems inherent in the healthcare system today, and explores what a health system that copes with illness and also helps us to live well for longer might look like. Whether the healthcare system helps or hinders our health may seem a silly question. After all, the NHS has been crucial in saving the lives of tens of thousands of people during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic; without it the death toll would have been many times higher. But is our healthcare system helping us to be and remain healthy in the long term? Despite the efforts of the health and care workforce, there were more than 60,000 excess deaths in England and Wales in the three months from March to May 2020. The NHS was not set up, nor was it resilient enough, to cope with normal care and COVID-19 together.