Raluca

I grew up in Bucharest and came to London at 18 to study biomedical sciences at Queen Mary University. While I was completing my degree, I worked as a healthcare assistant at Whipps Cross Hospital. Every shift, I watched the ward staff shortages worsen. Nurses covering twice the patients they should. Doctors pulled across departments. My younger brother back in Romania is studying medicine, and I was determined to prove that immigrant healthcare workers like us are essential to the NHS. I wanted to qualify as a nurse and show him that London valued the skills we brought.

In 2019, I applied for nursing training at Barts Health NHS Trust. The programme looked perfect. The hospital was five minutes from my flat. I had three years of healthcare experience. My academic record was solid. Then the admissions team told me there were only 40 funded places for 200 applicants. They explained that Health Education England had capped their budget and they could not afford more training slots. It sounded reasonable. Budgets have limits. I accepted it.

I tried City, University of London the following year. Same story. The admissions officer was apologetic. She said, "We'd love to take more students like you, but the Treasury funding just isn't there." Again, it made sense. The Treasury controls government spending. If they said there was no money, there was no money. I applied to three more programmes across London. Each one told me the same thing: demand was high, places were limited, funding was the constraint.

Frustrated, I applied directly to NHS England's workforce planning team in 2020. They told me to wait for the next funding cycle. They were working on expanding training places, they said, but it would take time to secure the budget. I waited. I kept working as a healthcare assistant, watching the wards struggle with staff shortages every day.

In 2021, something happened that changed how I saw the whole system. I discovered that the University of East London's nursing school had 30 empty places in their January intake. International student fees had dropped during COVID, so they could not fill the programme. The places existed. The training existed. The lecturers were there. But they sat empty because the funding model required international students to subsidise domestic training.

The same week, I met my neighbour Micah from Dulwich at a healthcare workers' protest outside Westminster. He had faced exactly the same barriers trying to get into nursing training. We compared stories. Different universities. Different trusts. Same excuses. "There is no funding." "The budget has been cut." "We cannot afford to run that programme."

But as we talked, the contradictions became impossible to ignore. He told me about empty training places at his local university. I told him about the 30 unused places at UEL. We started asking: if the people exist, and the universities exist, and the training programmes exist, what exactly is it that "there is no money" for?

Then I saw the physical proof. The building that used to house additional nursing simulation labs at Whipps Cross now sits locked and unused. I walk past it every day on my way to work. The equipment inside is gathering dust while the hospital runs dangerously understaffed shifts. The labs could be training the nurses the hospital desperately needs. Instead, they are closed because someone at the Treasury decided the budget could not stretch to keeping them open.

That was when I stopped accepting the excuse. The government that prints the notes and mints the coins told me it could not find enough of them to train the people who were standing right there, ready to work. But I could see the unused training places. I could see the locked building full of equipment. I could see the wards running short-staffed every single day. The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the materials were available. They were. All of them.

The excuse was not a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. It is the same logic as a household that says "we cannot afford it," except a household does not issue its own currency. The government does. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it.

I am still here. Still working as a healthcare assistant. Still watching the contradictions play out every day. What I understand now that I did not understand at the start is that every time someone in Westminster says "there is no funding," they are making a political decision and dressing it as an accounting problem. The Treasury chooses to treat public investment as a cost to be minimised rather than as the means by which trained nurses and doctors reach the wards that need them.

This is not just my story. It is the story of every constituency where people and needs exist side by side while someone in Westminster says the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never empty. The decision was made to keep it locked.