Nishan

My mum spent fifteen years as a healthcare assistant before she retired. I watched her come home exhausted but fulfilled, knowing she'd helped people through some of the worst days of their lives. When I finished my biomedical sciences degree at Portsmouth, becoming a radiographer felt like the natural next step. I wanted that same sense of purpose, using technology to diagnose conditions early, to give families answers they desperately needed.

I'd grown up around North Hampshire Hospital where my mum worked. Even as a student, I could see the radiography department was stretched thin. Patients waited months for routine scans. Staff worked overtime constantly. It seemed obvious that training more radiographers would solve the problem, and I was ready to be part of that solution.

In 2019, I applied for diagnostic radiography training at Winchester University. The course had an excellent reputation, and Winchester was close enough that I could stay connected to the community where I wanted to work. When the rejection letter arrived, I assumed I hadn't been competitive enough. But when I called to ask for feedback, the admissions tutor told me something unexpected: "All the places were filled, but we had many more qualified applicants than we could take. The number of funded training places has been reduced this year."

I contacted Health Education England's regional office to understand what this meant. The officer I spoke to was sympathetic but clear: "Treasury spending limits have required us to reduce training places by 15% this year. We simply don't have the budget to fund more positions, even though we know the demand is there."

That sounded reasonable at the time. Budgets have limits. I took a job as a healthcare assistant at North Hampshire Hospital and planned to reapply the following year. Working on the wards gave me even more conviction that radiography was my calling, but it also showed me the human cost of the staffing crisis. I watched patients anxiously wait weeks for scan results that could have been available in days with adequate staffing. I saw radiographers working double shifts because vacant positions couldn't be filled.

When applications opened for 2020, I applied again with even more experience and determination. This time, the rejection came with a different explanation: "Due to fiscal constraints related to the pandemic response, training place funding has been further reduced. We understand this is disappointing, but there simply isn't the money available."

I decided to try a different route through apprenticeships. Hampshire County Council ran healthcare apprenticeship programmes that could lead to the same qualification through a work-study model. I visited their offices in Winchester, convinced this would be my breakthrough. The apprenticeships coordinator listened to my background and nodded enthusiastically: "You'd be perfect for our programme. Unfortunately, our healthcare apprenticeship budget has been slashed. We can't take on new cohorts this year."

Everywhere I turned, the answer was the same: "There is no funding." I began to accept this as an immutable fact, the way you accept the weather. The government had competing priorities. Healthcare training was expensive. Resources were finite. These were adults making difficult decisions with limited money.

But in early 2021, I discovered something that changed how I understood those conversations entirely. A friend who worked in university administration mentioned something odd about Winchester's radiography department. Curious, I contacted them directly and asked to speak with the department head. What she told me made no sense within the logic I'd been given.

"We have eight unfilled training places sitting empty," she explained. "The lecturers are here. The equipment is here. The clinical placements are arranged with local hospitals. But Health Education England's budget won't stretch to fund these places, so we can't offer them to anyone."

I stood in the university car park after that meeting, looking at the building where I could have been training for the past two years. The classrooms existed. The teachers existed. I existed, along with dozens of other qualified applicants. But the connection between us had been severed by something called "the budget."

That week, I learned something else that deepened my confusion. North Hampshire Hospital had just signed a contract with an overseas recruitment agency to bring in radiographers from the Philippines. The agency fee alone was three times what it would have cost to train someone locally. When I asked a senior radiographer about this, she shrugged: "We're desperate. We can't wait for the domestic training pipeline to restart."

I started to ask a different question: if the people exist, and the training places exist, and the desperate need exists, what exactly is it that there's "no money" for? The government that prints £20 notes told me it couldn't find enough of them to connect willing students to empty training places while paying triple to solve the same problem through agencies.

The excuse stopped sounding reasonable. It started sounding like something else entirely.

I used to accept the logic that "there was no money" for healthcare training. I hear those words differently now. The government that issues the pound chose not to spend the pounds that would connect qualified applicants to empty training places. That wasn't an accounting problem. That was a political choice dressed in the language of impossibility.

The real question was never about money. It was about whether the people existed, whether the skills could be taught, whether the equipment and placements were available. They were. All of them. I could see them with my own eyes: the empty lecture halls, the eager applicants, the NHS departments crying out for staff.

The limit was never the currency. The limit was the willingness to spend it where it was needed most. Every time someone told me "there's no funding," they were applying household logic to a currency issuer. As though the Bank of England could run out of pounds the way I might run out of cash in my wallet.

I'm still here, still working as a healthcare assistant, still watching. But I understand now that my story isn't unique to me. It's 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 bare. The decision to keep it locked was deliberate.