Covid-19 has changed how the UK thinks about healthcare forever. The pandemic put the NHS – how it works, how it is funded and what its future might be - at the centre of the biggest news story of our lifetimes.

This historic challenge has demanded significant sacrifices from NHS clinicians and patients, but has also sparked extraordinary fresh thinking, creativity and innovation across our healthcare system.

The next decade will present daunting structural challenges to our service. Nowhere is this pressure on the NHS felt more acutely than at the local level. Across the country primary care is at the fulcrum point where national health strategy meets local clinical need. The challenges they face are immense and growing, but our collective response to Covid-19 shows how we can begin to tackle them.

At Pharmacetura, we have built powerful tools to help clinicians, patients and healthcare leaders achieve their goals. We began life as the UK's first platform to offer video consultations online and via smartphone – offering quick, easy and convenient access to NHS-trained, GMC-registered doctors.

These days our technology does much more than that – helping surgeries manage demand, matching the correct clinician with the right patient and, for the first time, allowing the NHS’s many disparate databases to communicate seamlessly with each other.

We are a technology firm, but we are not disruptors. Instead, we work in partnership with the NHS and its amazing clinicians to serve patients across the UK, helping them access healthcare quickly and easily using smartphones and computers. We do all of this with a relentless focus on safety and high-quality clinical outcomes for patients.

Our partnerships with the NHS continue to grow and we now provide services to 5.7 million NHS patients across the UK. At the same time, we are expanding patient access to a wider range of clinicians, from GPs to physiotherapists to pharmacists and offering a private service for those patients who want it. This means we effectively direct patients to the right clinicians at the right time, speeding up treatment times and taking the burden off GPs.

Patients like what we do and there is a growing demand for the service we provide. At present, 99% of the appointments we make available on our platform are filled.