The celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS underline the general view that despite its many challenges and crises, few organisations are as admired or respected by the public.

It’s certainly hard to think of another public service that would, as it did during the Covid pandemic, get people out on the streets banging saucepans to mark their support.

Kent is no different to many other areas in terms of its problems. In fact, it is arguably worse, with high-profile scandals such as that engulfing east Kent maternity services.

A report published in April gave a worrying analysis of the health of people in the county and the need to reverse some troubling trends.

Among them was that life expectancy is no longer increasing in the way it was; relative performance on many health outcome measures is declining in Kent compared with the national level; measures of poor mental health, such as depression, are increasing; improving the health of children in poverty is lagging behind the national rate. Lifestyle behaviours remain problematic, with two-thirds of people overweight and an increase in smoking levels in Kent for the first time in many years.

At the same time, the capacity of the care system to meet these challenges is under unrelenting strain.

The latest solution lies in the introduction of something called the integrated care system - which is heavy on collaboration and joint working between the social care sector and acute care.

If you have a sense of deja vu, it’s probably because virtually every other reorganisation in the NHS has identified it as a key challenge.

Back in 2002, the then-Labour government was forced to give one-off payments to councils to address the issue of needing more care home places. Kent got £4.5m - which the council said did not go far enough.

“Uncertainty makes it all the more difficult to plan ahead but the government’s indecision is forcing the NHS to do just that…”

Fast forward to 2023 and evidence shows, every day, about 1,000 people in Kent and Medway are in a hospital bed when they no longer need to be.

Other figures show 528,000 people – that’s almost one in three – live with one or more significant long-term health conditions, including around 12,000 with dementia.

Then there is the well-documented shortage of GPs, with health chiefs saying that if staffing was in line with the national average, there would be 175 more GPs in Kent and Medway.

And casting a shadow is the as yet unresolved issue of a wider reorganisation of acute NHS hospitals in Kent, which remains in limbo.

This uncertainty makes it all the more difficult to plan ahead but the government’s indecision is forcing the NHS to do just that.

If services are not to buckle under this uncertainty, which also affects recruitment, decisions are needed sooner rather than later.