alsojoining us is sophie corlett who is director of external relations at mind, making the mental healthe in public debates. sophie is also responsible for helping local nhs services in england to improve their response to people in mental health crisis. good to have both of you here with us and i know that chaand nagpaul will be with us as soon as he can. and let's talk first of all about the implications of this, chris, in terms of the scale. can you paint a picture first of all of what exactly we are faced with in the nhs now in terms of backlog? how it looked before the pandemic and how it looks now? before we went into the pandemic, we know the nhs was slightly struggling because we know we had more cases, we had more people wanting treatment than we were able to treat. so we had some of the worst waiting times we had seen for a long time and then what happened is we had covid. what has happened under covid effectively is we had to concentrate on treating people who are seriously ill. so, surprise, surprise, we had to turn operating theatres into temporary intensive care units. that

also sophie corlett from the mental health charity mind. of you here with us and i know that he will be with us and i know that he will be with us as soon as he can. and let's talk first of all about the implications of this in terms of the scale. can you paint a picture of what exactly we are faced with in the nhs in terms of backlog? i would look before the pandemic and how it looks now was before went to the pandemic, we know the nhs was slightly struggling because we know, we had more cases we struggling because we know, we had more case ., ., ., more cases we had more than we were able to treat- — more cases we had more than we were able to treat. we _ more cases we had more than we were able to treat. we saw— more cases we had more than we were able to treat. we saw the _ more cases we had more than we were able to treat. we saw the worst - able to treat. we saw the worst waiting times we he seemed a long time that we had covid—i9. it happened at the covid—i9 was we had to concentrate on treating people who are seriously ill. surprise