Kelvin Hurd was in the middle of a long shift as an NHS paramedic when he heard what Tory chairman Greg Hands had to say about Britain’s broken public services.
“Overall, our public services are in great shape,” Hands, the Conservative MP for Chelsea and Fulham, said in a radio interview. “I think public services are improving.”
Like millions across the country, Kelvin was stunned.
“Well, if he is happy with people dying waiting for ambulances then it’s in great shape,” Kelvin says. “Patients are dying every day because we can’t get there. They’re dying deaths that could be prevented. But this government doesn’t care.”
Nurse Harry Eccles, 28, says Hands’ claim is “nothing short of gaslighting”. A clinical nurse specialist in addiction and drugs, he says the NHS could hardly be in worse shape.
“We are at breaking point,” he says. “We can’t continue to serve the public like this.
“When the country was in crisis, the NHS helped. Now the NHS is in crisis and the Government isn’t helping us.”
Sumi Manirajan, 29, a junior doctor, echoes her colleagues’ words.
“We’re unable to give the care that we want to and it’s really demoralising they would say that the public services are running optimally because every single day we’re seeing that they’re not.
“I’ve seen patients on trolleys waiting in corridors because there weren’t enough beds or staff to look after them, in pain, crying, waiting to be seen by a doctor and be assessed. And they’re frightened.
“I think if we can’t acknowledge that we can’t even begin to address the problem.”
A specialist urgent care paramedic, Kelvin, 52, will walk out on May 1 and 2 with Unite the Union colleagues in several ambulance trusts across England.
The timing will mean ambulance staff on strike at the same time as nurses in some parts of the country, as Royal College of Nursing (RCN) members take further action after rejecting a government pay offer. This follows strikes by junior doctors in March and April in which Sumi, a committee member of the British Medical Association (BMA), also took part.
“Most people working in healthcare are not normally political, but we are desperate,” Harry, who was signed off for several weeks with physical exhaustion after Covid, says.
“People go into this profession because they love it, they care. But we’re at the point where one member of staff is doing the jobs of two or three people. People are feeling destroyed.”
Kelvin has been a paramedic for 22 years.
“No one who does this job would ever want to strike,” he says. “It’s a vocation. You come intothe NHS because you want to help people, because you care, and the Government exploits that.
“But now we don’t have any choice. We’re fighting for our lives. We have to strike to save the NHS. The NHS is broken and they are destroying it.”
He is haunted by a night shift when “someone was calling for a cardiac arrest and I had to tell them that the nearest ambulance was 35minutes away”.
“It’s dangerous,” he says. “Three or four times a shift I’ll hear a call for a Cat 1 which needs an emergency response. But I can’t respond because I’m with a patient in the ambulance, waiting.
“I grew up in the North under Thatcher but even then, it felt like there was hope, now I’m not sure. I’ve never known a time when people felt so down.”
When a member of Kelvin’s family fell ill, he advised them to make their own way to hospital rather than rely on the emergency service he has spent more than two decades working for.
“A member of my family rang me on Christmas Day because they were ill,” he says.
“I told them not to call an ambulance because they’d be waiting for too long. They got their own transport. They ended up staying in for a week.”
The Department of Health and Social Care declined to comment.
Sumi says that as a doctor, she feels she has a “moral obligation” to speak out.
“I think obviously we all have an obligation to do something when we can see that there’s something going wrong,” she says.
This sense of duty has seen Sumi take strike action with other junior doctors in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, over the May Bank Holiday, both Kelvin and Harry will walk out in a last-ditch attempt to save the NHS they love. Paramedic Kelvin in the North, and nurse Harry on the South Coast.
“I work in acute settings and in the last year we have seen referrals go up by 100%, but there is just one of me,” Harry says. “For me it is ideology. We know the Government finds the money when they want something.
“Vast amounts of money is going into the private agencies, filling their pockets to plug the gap. We’re talking billions that could go into the NHS.
“It is simple: the NHS needs more staff and more wages. We know the PM is wealthier than the King and when asked if he had an NHS GP, he refused to answer. Meanwhile, the average pay for a nurse keeps falling.”
Kelvin says NHS staff have been left with no choice but to take action.
“If we don’t fight for it, it won’t be there for us when we need it,” he says.
“And if we don’t fight for the NHS, who will?”
