Image source, BBC/Reuters

As well as the main guests, Laura Kuenssberg will be joined by a panel of three key players who bring their own opinions and expertise to bear on the issues of the day and the interviews on the programme.

This week she’s joined by Prof Clive Kay, the chief executive of King’s College Hospital in south London, Royal College of Nursing general secretary Pat Cullen and former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane.

Clive Kay has been the boss of King’s College Hospital in Camberwell, south London, since April 2019. A radiologist by training, he is responsible for one of the largest teaching hospitals in the country which serves a large and diversity community in London’s inner city.

Pat Cullen has been general secretary of the nurses’ union the Royal College of Nursing since 2021. Cullen has held numerous senior nursing roles in Northern Ireland in hospitals and the community over the past 20 years.

Andy Haldane was chief economist at the Bank of England - an institution he worked at for 32 years. In 2021, shortly before he left the Bank to take up his new role as chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, he warned that inflation could reach 4% that year - and called at the time for action to tame rising prices.

Image source, Jeff Overs/BBC

Sir Sam Mendes has been speaking to Laura Kuenssberg about his new film Empire of Light which is out in cinemas from tomorrow.

Described by our own Lizo Mzimba as a love letter to the movies, it is set in a small coastal cinema during the 1980s and stars Oscar winner Olivia Colman as the cinema's manager. Mendes' story explores everything from romance to racism, misogyny to mental health.

Mendes won the Oscar for best director in 1999 for the film American Beauty and has gone on to helm other blockbusters including two James Bond movies (Spectre and Skyfall) and World War One epic 1917.

He’s also a highly sought after theatre director, with credits including The Lehman Trilogy and King Lear at the National Theatre.

We’ll hear from Mendes at around 9.30 this morning.

This week’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg is primarily focused on the continuing concerns about the health of the NHS across the nation as it battles rising levels of winter illnesses such as Covid and flu, but also contends with strikes by nurses and ambulance crews in a row over pay and retention.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak - who is on the programme at 9am - held a meeting with NHS bosses, the health secretary and Treasury ministers in a bid to tackle the acute pressures the health service is under.

Sunak also faces questions over the ongoing cost of living crisis and what the government is doing to tackle the continuing - and sometimes deadly - use of small boats by migrants attempting to cross the English Channel to come to the UK.

We’ll also hear from shadow health secretary Wes Streeting. He was critical of yesterday’s NHS meeting at Downing Street, saying that officials have been warning of the looming crisis for months.

But we know, from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s speech last week that there will not be a sudden increase in public spending as he warned the party "would not be getting its big chequebook out".

We’ll hear from both men after 9am this morning.

Welcome to our continuing live coverage in text and video of this week’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.

For the first programme of the new year, Kuenssberg interviews Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in a week which has seen him outline his five priorities for this parliament.

Responding for Labour is the party’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting.

Also on the programme is film and theatre director Sir Sam Mendes - who will be talking about his new movie Empire of Light which has been called a hymn, ode, or love letter to cinema.

As befits the current immense pressures being faced by the NHS across the UK, there’s a wealth of experience from the health sector on our panel - with Clive Kay, chief executive of King’s College Hospital in south London and Pat Cullen, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, joining Laura Kuenssberg on her Sunday panel along with Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England.

All that and more to come when the programme goes on air at 9am.