“Resilience requires buffer and buffer can look wasteful until the moment that it isn’t,” Simon Stevens told MPs at a committee hearing in parliament this week. We discuss how the pandemic made the NHS’ approach to running everything to optimum, just-in-time efficiency fall apart.

We also talk about NHS England’s decision to start collecting race and ethnicity date when giving the covid vacation seven weeks after the programme was launched and what impact this could have on health inequalities.

And of course, a vaccine roll-out update, did the NHS miss its care home vaccination target after all?

Featuring Annabelle Collins, Nick Kituno, Jasmine Rapson and Jack Serle