Kiran

My name is Kiran. I'm 26, and I live in Shettleston where my family settled when we moved from Punjab in 2005. My grandmother lived with us until she died of COVID in April 2020. She was 78 and had been healthy until then, but the hospitals were overwhelmed and she couldn't get the care she needed in time. After we lost her, I knew I wanted to work in healthcare. Not just to help people like her, but because I could see how desperately the system needed more skilled workers.

I had already finished my biomedical science degree at Strathclyde University the year before. Throughout my studies, I worked part-time as a care assistant in a local nursing home to pay my way through university. I loved the hands-on work, the problem-solving, the feeling that what I did mattered. I was good at it too. My supervisors always said I had the right instincts for healthcare. When I graduated, I thought the next step would be straightforward: get into NHS training, specialise in something like radiography where I could use my science background, and start my career helping people.

I was wrong about the straightforward part.

In early 2021, I applied to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde's Allied Health Professions training programme for diagnostic radiography. It seemed like the perfect fit. I had the degree, the experience, and the motivation. The response I got back was polite but crushing: the programme was oversubscribed with a two-year waiting list. Two years. I would be 28 before I could even start training.

I thought there might be other routes, so I contacted Health Education England Scotland directly. The person I spoke with was sympathetic but clear: "We've had to reduce training places by 15% due to budget constraints," she told me. "There is no funding to expand the programmes, even though we know vacancy rates are rising." At the time, that sounded reasonable. Budgets are tight everywhere, I thought. At least they were honest about it.

I tried a different approach. Glasgow Caledonian University offered nursing conversion courses that would let me use my existing degree as a foundation. When I called, the admissions officer explained their priority system: "We have limited places and existing NHS staff get first consideration for professional development," he said. "The budget has been cut and we cannot afford to run that programme at full capacity." Again, it seemed logical. Existing staff should get opportunities to advance.

So I went for the most direct route I could find: healthcare assistant roles that might lead somewhere. Queen Elizabeth University Hospital hired me immediately. The work was exactly what I expected, and I was good at it. But when I asked about advancement pathways, my supervisor was frank: "You'd need qualifications we can't provide here," she said. "The internal training programmes were suspended when the education budget was restructured."

By 2023, I was ready to try again for radiography training. The West of Scotland deanery was accepting applications for their next intake. I submitted everything they asked for, confident that two more years of healthcare experience would strengthen my application. The rejection letter was brief: capacity limitations meant they could not offer me a place.

That same week, I was browsing NHS Jobs and I counted 47 unfilled radiographer positions advertised across Greater Glasgow and Clyde alone. Forty-seven jobs that needed filling, and they had just told me there was no capacity to train people like me to fill them.

That was when I started to see the contradiction clearly. It was not abstract anymore. I could point to specific things I could see with my own eyes. There was the radiography training centre at Glasgow Caledonian University. I had walked past it many times. The building was there, the equipment was there. There were people like me, with science degrees and healthcare experience, who wanted to do exactly this work. We existed. The jobs existed. The training facility existed.

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

I started asking different questions. If the government that issues the pound cannot find enough pounds to connect the people who want to do the work with the training they need to do it, what was the real constraint? It was not that the people did not exist. I knew dozens of healthcare assistants who wanted to qualify as nurses or radiographers. It was not that the skills could not be taught. The universities had the programmes and the expertise. It was not that the materials were unavailable. The scanners and the classrooms and the textbooks were all there.

The constraint was someone's decision not to spend the money that would bring all these pieces together.

I used to accept the excuse that "there was no money." I hear it differently now. 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 the government does not run out of currency the way a household runs out of cash. It creates the currency. 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.

What happened to me 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 is only bare because they chose not to fill it. The pounds exist. They could be spent tomorrow. The choice is political, not financial. And until more people understand that distinction, there will be more people like me, qualified and ready to serve, being told there is no room for us in a system crying out for exactly what we offer.