Alongside serving my constituents as their MP, during the junior doctors’ strike I have spent more than 20 night shifts over the past year or so working as a mental health doctor in a busy hospital A&E department. It has been a truly life-changing experience. Working on the frontline of a health service under great strain left me at times, as an MP, struggling to look my NHS colleagues, my patients and my constituents in the eye. Throughout the small hours, my clinical colleagues and I cared for many patients suffering from serious psychosis who would routinely be waiting several days, rather than hours, in a windowless room in A&E for a mental health bed. When beds finally became available, they would often be with a private healthcare provider hundreds of miles from their homes and the vital on-hand support from their friends and families. I saw countless people at potential risk of suicide and others in crisis with a dual diagnosis of alcohol or drug dependence, together with severe mental illness. The chaos of today’s fragmented patchwork of community addiction services – making A&E the default location for people to get treatment and help – has added pressure to an already overstretched service. The mental toll of a service stretched close to breaking point is not confined to patients and their families. It also weighs heavily on my NHS colleagues who are unable to deliver the right care in a system that simply no longer works for our patients.
It is this which has led me today to have resigned from the Conservative party to focus on my work as a doctor and to support Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, and the Labour party both before and after the general election on NHS policy. I shall continue to serve my constituents to the best of my ability until the next election – which I believe Rishi Sunak should call as soon as possible. After 14 years as an MP, including a period as health minister, I shall not be standing for parliament again.
I can well remember when I first qualified as a doctor and began working in the NHS in 2006. At the time, patient care had been radically improved and transformed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour governments, following many years of Conservative neglect and under-investment. I am proud to still work as an NHS doctor alongside energetically serving as the MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich. However, just as was the case in the 1990s, what my healthcare colleagues and I see on the frontline of the NHS today is a health service desperately struggling to deliver the care our patients deserve. I have come to the conclusion that, once again, the only cure is a Labour government. The NHS currently has record long waiting lists. More than 7.5 million people are waiting for treatment and more than 250,000 people are waiting over a year for their operations. More than one in three cancer patients wait more than two months to start treatment after an urgent referral, and the UK has some of the worst cancer survival rates in the developed world. In a major A&E department, 44% of patients wait more than four hours for their care, and 235,835 people a year wait more than a month for mental health treatment. I want much better than this for patients. As a consultant psychiatrist, I am deeply concerned about the failure of the government to implement vital reforms to mental health law and to the 1983 Mental Health Act, many of which were contained in Sir Simon Wessely’s independent review of the act in 2017. In particular, I am dismayed by the failure to address racial disparities in the use of mental health laws and to reform aspects of mental health law relating to the care of people with learning disability and autism. Community services have been hollowed out, leaving the system poorly equipped to prevent crisis admissions and deliver the transformative care in the community that mental health patients need. Over the past two years, the government has too often put the politics of public sector pay ahead of ending strikes with healthcare workers. Political ideology has been put before pragmatism and meeting the needs of patients – who are the real losers from the strikes. There has been a failure to address the longstanding pay concerns of NHS staff, and my nursing colleagues in particular, at a time of a cost of living crisis and increasing staff recruitment and retention challenges.
I also believe that, thanks to Keir Starmer, Labour has changed fundamentally. The Labour party of 2019 – roundly rejected by the British people – has been consigned to history. With Starmer’s leadership, the party understands that strong public services – and particularly a strong NHS – must be built on the bedrock of a strong economy. The Labour party is now a serious party of government, and it’s one in which I and the British public can put our trust. I believe it is now incumbent on me as a medical practitioner passionately committed to our NHS to throw my weight behind the Labour party in its determination to ensure we again have a health service of which we can be proud, and which best meets the needs of every patient. It is abundantly clear to me that the Labour party alone has the will and the trust to restore and reform the NHS. That’s why we need a Labour government, and why I believe Keir Starmer must lead that government as our next prime minister. • Dan Poulter, MP, is a consultant psychiatrist and a former Conservative health minister