The government recently sent letters to more than 65,000 retired doctors and nurses in England and Wales asking them to return to work to help the NHS cope with the coronavirus outbreak. Since then, 7,563 clinical staff have applied to come back to work, including 5,633 nurses and midwives, and 1,930 doctors to help support the hero frontline NHS workers caring for Covid-19 patients.

The public sector's relationship with technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate, as familiar legacy systems are increasingly phased out in favour of leading-edge digital infrastructure that offers levels of scalability, sustainability, and operational resilience that would previously have been dismissed as impossible.