Dr Zubir Ahmed

“Twenty-one years ago, when I started my NHS career as a junior doctor, there were Labour Governments in every part of Britain, and I was proud to have practised in every single nation of our country. The NHS then exemplified the mood of our nation: hopeful, comfortable in its own skin and confident about embracing, even shaping, its future. And we did shape that future. The Labour Government delivered world-class heart attack care, stroke care and cancer care, regardless of where someone lived and their ability to pay for it. We also drove through controversy to secure a smoke-free generation, starting in Scotland and then delivering it all across these isles. The success of that legislation is perhaps best exemplified in the fact that we now have a whole generation who feel it is their inalienable right to go indoors and never have to inhale passive smoke or suffer all the deleterious effects that come with it. Now, as then, the NHS is holding a mirror up to our society. For those who rely on it, there is anxiety and frustration about why, so often, we do not get the basics right, from grappling with the uncertainty of simply seeing a doctor or specialist to the anxiety that comes with waiting for a scan or its results. There are 1.5 million people working in the NHS—including once-idealistic surgeons like me, who unapologetically gave our youth to the NHS because we enjoyed our craft so much that sometimes it did not even feel like work—but those staff have been battered by austerity and covid. They are hoping for better days but, despite the improvements that have been made in the last two years, I know that they harbour a quiet hopelessness that perhaps their workplace can never be joyful again. They are good people who are resigned to running faster just to stay still and keep their patients safe. All that is because of a 14-year-long Tory Government and the choices they made. They made political choices to rob Peter to pay Paul, and to fail to invest in our NHS. In an era of AI, technology and digital transformation, they left highly skilled staff with 21st-century clinical skills and 20th-century equipment, and left the public feeling more adrift than ever from their most prized national asset. Let us also not spare their handmaidens in Scotland, the Scottish National Government, who fared no better: NHS spending going up and productivity coming down; no NHS app to book appointments or get test results; lung cancer screening lagging behind; and 24/7 21st-century stroke care that is more like Russian roulette. It is in this mood of cynicism and despondency that this Labour Government are charged with the responsibility of modernising our NHS and showing that we dare to go big again: going big on giving more power and control to patients and the staff who look after them; going big on taking the bold decisions, even if controversial, on becoming the healthiest generation that has ever lived; and going big on grasping the opportunity that technology presents us with. That is the path we start on today. It answers the cries of patients and answers the call of those who want to look after them. Take the single patient record, which has been lauded in the news today as an exemplar of this Bill. It is a programme that, as health innovation Minister, I was proud to start off and bring my NHS experience to. It is a simple concept, demanded by patients and the vast majority of people who look after them, that there should be a single and comprehensive source of truth about a patient’s history when it is most needed. Most of the public believe it already exists, yet it has proven harder than ever to deliver because of conservatism, paralysed by the thought of the worst outcomes and unable to plan for the best outcomes, and by a belief that patient safety and data safety are somehow tangled up in the status quo. There is nothing safe about going from one hospital to another where a consultant cannot see your scans, or your child urgently attending an A&E department where their medical history cannot be seen or, as recently happened in my own practice in the middle of the night, having to turn down an organ donation because we could not access GP records at the weekend. What about data security? The NHS is dependent on thousands of IT systems born out of necessity rather than design. If we were designing it, we would never have done it this way, but we must now be absolutely committed to making sure that data is safe and that military-grade security prevails. During my time as health innovation Minister, I was clear—as those on our Front Bench today are clear—that NHS data is sovereign and must be used for the benefit of patients. We can no longer afford to look the other way. We have to lean in to the arguments and the headwinds that say, “No, not yet” or, “Not this much all at once.” We have to say to our citizens, and to our NHS staff who demand we get the basics right, that we are ready to face down those headwinds, those noisy tweets and those vested interest positions and say loudly, “Yes, right now” and, “Yes, as big as we can,” because our NHS can, because its patients expect us to, and because its users demand us to go further. This movement and this party were born of difficult times to deliver in difficulty, and this Bill will definitely and ultimately deliver on that promise.”