NHS: Long-term Sustainability

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, thank you for the opportunity to give my maiden speech. I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for the opportunity to speak in this important debate as well as noble Lords on all sides of the House, who have made me feel so warmly welcome. I thank Black Rod—who actually knows where Wall Heath is, without any explanation—her staff, the doorkeepers and many others who have been so supportive and informative, helping me on a daily basis to find my way around this beautiful building.

I am also grateful to my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer for introducing me, and to my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley, who insisted that my ninth day in this House was the right time for me to give my maiden speech.

When I got the news that I was to be nominated for a peerage, my first words were unrepeatable for Hansard. My second were to regret that my father and mother are no longer alive to witness this amazing honour and privilege. They were Lancastrians, children of men who worked down the pit, from a long line of proud trade unionists and co-op members. My mother wished all her life that she had had the opportunity to gain educational qualifications, but she had to leave school at 14, and then worked to pay the doctors’ bills, because her own mother was dying of stomach cancer, just before the introduction of the NHS.

My life-long personal interest in the NHS was originally driven by the life experiences of my older sister Patricia, who died six years ago. Patricia was born in the 1950s, with what we now call learning or intellectual disabilities, but at the time she was labelled first as “mentally defective”, then “mentally handicapped”, and she was also physically disabled. She lived from childhood until the 1980s in a huge, forbidding mental hospital in the West Midlands, which I was scared to visit as a little girl and teenager. As the years went on and the NHS evolved, she moved into the community, into a house with others, and we could visit her without having to ask for permission, and become involved in her medical and personal care. I became her co-guardian after our father’s death.

I have inherited my mother’s life-long gratitude to all those who work for the NHS, not least those in the hospital opposite this place—St Thomas’—where two of my children were born and three have been patients, one with a life-threatening peanut allergy, another with severe childhood asthma. Over time, my personal commitment to the NHS broadened into the professional. I was appointed chair of Lambeth Primary Care Trust, just over the river, and relished the opportunity to work in partnership with GPs and others to try and make a real difference to local people’s lives by, for example, helping to reduce teenage pregnancy and smoking rates. I then joined the board and became vice-chair of UCLH, where my youngest child was born.

In 2016, I was honoured to be appointed the chair of Cambridge University Hospitals, otherwise known as Addenbrooke’s. There, I was privileged to work with some of the world’s most distinguished doctors and biomedical scientists, whose commitment to ground-breaking research was matched only by their determination to see the results implemented to the benefit of the public at large—truly, medical research “from bench to bedside”.

Whatever comes next for the NHS, it is clear that, when it is properly funded—as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, fought hard for in challenging economic circumstances—its people do wonderful work. This is particularly true when doctors, nurses and other health professionals, both in and out of hospitals, as well as those in public health, work truly collaboratively to help our growing and older population stay in good health for as long as possible.

In my experience, structural reorganisations designed—however well-meaningly—to try to achieve improvements are trumped every time by positive relationships between clinicians, managers, patients and the public, supported by the right level of funding in the right place, at the right time. This is just as true for the NHS’s engagement with other public services. We are all kept as healthy as possible, and taxpayers’ money is spent well, when the NHS, local government, housing associations and schools work in partnership to support adults and young people with chronic and challenging conditions.

The NHS’s continuous commitment to finding new methods of care, in partnership with others, improved my sister’s life immeasurably over the years. Free healthcare, available to all who need it, at the point of delivery, seemed to my mother like the best thing that a Government could offer its citizens, as she paid those bills long after her mother died. She was right, and said so repeatedly when, 40 years later, my father was being treated for lung cancer. The NHS care that he was able to get at home, from GPs and district nurses, was literally unaffordable for my poor grandmother.

I am grateful to have been able to contribute to this important debate, as well as to hear and learn from so many distinguished noble Lords. I look forward to many more excellent, informed and expert debates in this House—listening carefully to everybody—which this House is famous for.