I’m resigning from the Tory party and joining Labour: only they want to fix our NHS | Then Poulter

aWhile serving my constituents as their Member of Parliament, I spent over twenty night shifts as a mental health doctor in the emergency room of a busy hospital during the doctors’ strike last year. It has truly been a life-changing experience.

Working under great pressure on the frontline of a health service, as an MP I sometimes struggled to look my NHS colleagues, my patients and my constituents in the eye. During the wee hours, my clinical colleagues and I cared for many patients suffering from severe psychosis who routinely had to wait several days instead of hours in a windowless room in the emergency department for a mental health bed.

When beds finally became available, they often found themselves with a private care provider hundreds of miles from home and receiving vital support from their friends and family. I saw countless people at potential risk of suicide and others in crisis with a dual diagnosis of alcohol or drug addiction, combined with serious mental illness.

The chaos of today’s fragmented patchwork of community addiction care – which makes emergency departments the default location for people to receive treatment and help – has put pressure on already overburdened services. The mental toll of a service close to breaking point is not limited 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.

This is why I have today resigned from the Conservative Party to focus on my work as a doctor and support Keir Starmer, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister, Wes Streeting, and the Labor Party both before and after general election on NHS policy. .

I will continue to serve my constituents as best I can until the next election – which I believe Rishi Sunak should call as soon as possible. After fourteen years as a Member of Parliament, including a period as Minister of Health, I will no longer stand for election to Parliament.

I can still remember when I first qualified as a doctor and started working in the NHS in 2006. At the time, patient care had been radically improved and transformed by the Labor governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, after many years of Conservative neglect and understaffing. investment.

I am proud to still be working as an NHS doctor, as well as being an energy MP for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich. But today, as in the 1990s, my healthcare colleagues and I see on the frontline of the NHS a health service desperately struggling to deliver the care our patients deserve.

I have come to the conclusion that, once again, the only remedy is a Labor 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 more than a year for their operation. More than one in three cancer patients wait more than two months before starting treatment after an urgent referral, and Britain has one of the worst cancer survival rates in the developed world. In a large emergency department, 44% of patients wait more than four hours for their care, and 235,835 people per 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 government’s failure to implement crucial reforms to mental health legislation and to the Mental Health Act 1983, many of which were included in Sir Simon Wessely’s independent review of the law in 2017.

I am particularly 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 disabilities and autism. reform. Community services have been eroded, leaving the system ill-equipped to prevent crisis admissions and provide the transformative care in the community that mental health patients need.

Over the past two years, the government has too often made the politics of public sector wages more important than ending health worker strikes. Political ideology is more important than pragmatism and meeting the needs of patients – who are the real losers of the strikes. It has failed to address the long-standing pay concerns of NHS staff, and my nursing colleagues in particular, at a time of a cost of living crisis and increasing difficulties in recruitment and retention of staff.

I also believe that, thanks to Keir Starmer, Labor has fundamentally changed. The Labor 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 in particular a strong NHS – must be built on the foundation of a strong economy. The Labor Party is now a serious party of government, and it is one in which I and the British public can place our confidence.

I believe it is now my job as a doctor who is passionately committed to our NHS to lend my support to the Labor Party in its determination to ensure that we once again have a healthcare service that we can be proud of, and that it best meets the needs of the population. every patient.

It is abundantly clear to me that only the Labor Party has the will and confidence to fix and reform the NHS. That’s why we need a Labor government, and that’s why I believe Keir Starmer should lead that government as our next Prime Minister.