My daughter died after waiting hours for an ambulance. We need to save the NHS

Having worked as a nurse within the NHS for years, I knew the signs weren’t good. My 33-year-old daughter had been well enough to come back home to spend a week with us in the middle of months of treatment for a rare cancer that had been diagnosed just two months before. But now – on the night before she was due to go back in – she had woken up feeling unwell. We phoned her hospital, and then dialled 999.

We’d been overjoyed to have her back with us – happy among family and friends, she had had a blast. We’d been slowly trying to adjust to the heartbreaking news of her diagnosis, which came shortly before news of her engagement. We’d been trying to come to terms with the short life expectancy that comes with this form of cancer, and the reality that the only care options she had were palliative. Our days together that week had brought us back a priceless sense of normality.

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But now her health appeared to be dramatically and unexpectedly declining. She needed urgent care, but – despite the best efforts of the amazing NHS staff who cared for her – it was a full six hours from that first call to the ambulance service to the moment she arrived at A&E. She’d developed sepsis. Allyson died that night.

It is less than three years since I lost my beautiful daughter. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t wonder how many more days we might have had together if she’d got the medical care she needed when she needed it.

But there is hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about the others. The families going through the equally tragic, life defining and wholly avoidable deaths of their loved ones because of the deep crisis within our NHS.

According to statistics highlighted in the recent government-commissioned Darzi Review, 38 people like my daughter will die today, tomorrow, and every day who might otherwise live, were it not for the deep dysfunction wrought on our NHS by 15 years of austerity, disorganisation, and privatisation under the Conservative government.

There are surely few more damning stories to tell about the failure of national leadership than a government that turns one of the best performing health services in the world to one that is killing patients in the tens of thousands every year.

And so surely there must be some hope to be found in the political events of 2024, with Labour sweeping to power with a pledge to end the crisis in the NHS and restore it to an institution we can all feel pride in once again.

And yes – the Darzi Review showed the new government are at least acknowledging the depth of the crisis the NHS is in – an essential prerequisite to doing something about it. 

But with coalition and Conservative austerity budgets meaning the NHS missed out, according to the BMA, on £362bn pounds of spending it would have received if investment had kept pace with the historical average, the meagre increases in NHS funds announced in the autumn budget are not a sign that Labour are pitching solutions that can match the scale of the crisis. Even the conservative King’s Fund think tank wagered the additional cash is “unlikely to be enough for patients to see a real improvement in the care they receive”.

Health secretary Wes Streeting is promising early 2025 will see the publication of a new ten year plan for the NHS, so political and policy developments in the next year will define the care patients will receive within the NHS long into the future.

But despite strong evidence showing private sector involvement in the NHS results in more patient deaths, worse outcomes, higher costs, poaching of NHS staff, and a weaker public health service, Streeting is ideologically committed to accelerating privatisation. This is just more of the same arguments we heard from the last government.

Streeting is using emotive arguments about reducing waiting lists to justify an increase in private sector provision that the public does not want, whilst ignoring far more successful, cost- effective, and sustainable efforts taken within the NHS to cut the unacceptable waiting times patients face. 

Furthermore, he has drawn criticism for his techno-utopian vision of big pharma and tech firms saving the NHS, doubling down on the technically, morally, and legally dubious Federated Data Platform contract with the military spy tech firm Palantir, widely criticised for its track record on human rights. And seeking to shift ever more processes and policy making to serve the interests of monopoly wielding pharmaceutical companies, even as their prices render effective cancer drugs unaffordable for NHS patients.

I’ve spent years working in the NHS seeing government failure make it harder and harder for me to care for my patients. I’ve now spent years grieving the loss of a daughter who died because of that failure. So as we head into another winter destined to bring more images of ambulances queuing outside hospitals, I can’t cling to a faint hope that because the politicians in power wear red ties, that we can relax about our right to health.

The New Year will be definitive for the NHS, that’s why I am organising, in Allyson’s memory, with Just Treatment. So patients and NHS staff are defining its future – demanding a fully funded, fully public health service that we all need and deserve, even if we have to fight Wes to win it. Join us.

Mike is a retired nurse, and Just Treatment supporter, based in Greater Manchester. Just Treatment are a patient advocacy organisation.

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