Lesley

I've lived in Whickham all my life, and I always knew I wanted to help people. After school I went straight into retail because that's what you did then – find any job that would have you. But when my mum had her stroke five years ago, something shifted. Watching the healthcare assistants on the ward, seeing how much difference they made to patients like her, I knew that was what I was meant to do. I'd been caring for my elderly neighbour Mr Patterson every weekend since his family moved to London anyway. It felt natural.

In 2022, I applied to Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust for their healthcare assistant training programme. I'd done my research, knew exactly which course I wanted, had my application ready months in advance. When I called to follow up, the recruitment coordinator told me, "I'm sorry, Lesley, but the course is full and our funding has been cut by NHS England due to Treasury spending constraints. We simply cannot afford to run additional cohorts this year."

It sounded reasonable. Everyone knows the NHS is under pressure. I accepted it and decided to try again the following year.

In 2023, same story. This time I cast my net wider and applied to Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. Different trust, same response: "Unfortunately, our Health Education England allocation has been reduced significantly. There is no funding for new training places at present." Again, the same phrase: no funding.

I started to wonder if this was just the way things were now. Maybe I'd missed my chance. But something nagged at me. If there was such a shortage of healthcare workers – and you couldn't turn on the news without hearing about it – why weren't they training more people?

That's when I decided to visit the Northern School of Health at Northumbria University. I thought maybe I could understand the system better, perhaps find another route in. What I found there changed everything.

I walked through corridors lined with empty computer labs. Entire teaching rooms with rows of unused workstations, screens dark, chairs tucked neatly under desks. I spoke to Dr Margaret Thornton, one of the lecturers, who showed me around. "We have capacity for twice as many students," she told me, gesturing at the empty spaces. "The infrastructure is here, the teaching staff are here, but we cannot get the funding approved. Every year we submit proposals to expand our cohorts, and every year we're told the same thing: the budget has been cut."

There it was again. The budget has been cut. But I was standing in rooms that could train dozens more healthcare workers, with qualified lecturers who wanted to teach them. The contradiction was right there in front of me.

At the job centre the following week, I met Sarah, David, and Michelle – three unemployed care workers who'd been trying to get onto nursing degree apprenticeships for months. All of them had experience, all of them passionate about healthcare, all of them being told there were no places available. Sarah had been caring for her disabled sister for years. David had worked in a care home before it closed down. Michelle had been a healthcare assistant until her department was "restructured" and her position eliminated.

"It's mad, isn't it?" Sarah said. "They're crying out for nurses, but we can't get on the courses to become them. We're sat here ready to work, and they're telling us there's no money to train us."

That weekend, walking to Mr Patterson's house, I took a detour past the old Birtley Community Health Centre. It's been boarded up for two years now, but you can still see the training equipment through the windows – examination beds, CPR dummies, all the kit you'd need to teach basic healthcare skills. Just sitting there, gathering dust, while people like me are being told there's nowhere to learn.

Standing outside that locked building, something clicked. The people exist – me, Sarah, David, Michelle, and hundreds of others who want to do this work. The places exist – empty computer labs, unused training rooms, closed centres that could be reopened. The teachers exist – I'd met them. The equipment exists – I could see it through the windows.

So what exactly was it that "there was no money" for?

The government that prints the notes and mints the coins told me it could not find enough of them to connect the people standing right there to the training they needed. But that didn't make sense anymore. I started to understand that the real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed – they did. Whether the skills could be taught – they could. Whether the facilities were available – they were.

The excuse wasn't a fact. It was a choice wrapped in the language of impossibility. When someone said "we cannot afford it," they were using the same logic as a household budgeting the weekly shop. Except households don't issue their own currency. The government does.

I used to accept that there was no money. I hear it differently now. The limit was never the money. The limit was the willingness to spend it into the places and the people who needed it. Someone in Westminster decided that training healthcare workers wasn't worth the expense, while wards stayed understaffed and patients waited longer for care.

I'm still here, still watching, still caring for Mr Patterson every weekend. But now I understand what happened to me wasn't bad luck or unfortunate timing. It was a series of political choices made by people who had alternatives. They chose to keep the training centres closed, the computer labs empty, the courses unfunded. They chose to treat public investment as a burden rather than as the means by which skilled healthcare workers reach the wards.

And I know this isn't just my story. It's happening in every constituency where people who want to care are told there's no room for them to learn how, while the government that could fund their training explains why the cupboard is bare. The cupboard was never bare. Someone just decided not to fill it.