As a doctor, I know the NHS can be brought back to life – I saw it happen under New Labour

‘In a recruitment and retention crisis, what employer in their right mind would be hellbent on forcing a humiliating real-terms pay cut on its employees?’ NHS staff on strike in London, December 2022. Photograph: Velar Grant/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

I started to experience crisis in the NHS when I qualified as a doctor in 1981, and it would only get worse and worse over the next decade. The main indicators of failure were, and still are, delays in planned surgery and in emergency care.

I got used to patients coming to see me doped up on morphine and in a wheelchair because of excruciating pain from an arthritic hip, after waiting two years or more for surgery. I would write letters to orthopaedic surgeons pleading the case, knowing they would simply join a pile of similar letters. There was, by the way, no point trying to get on to the waiting list two years before you needed your new hip; only those who needed surgery urgently earned the ticket to start waiting.