'I am very passionate about the NHS...but it's not working'

MARIA Caulfield knows the NHS inside out. The former health minister worked as a nurse before entering Parliament and now she is back on the wards at London’s Royal Marsden, one of the world’s leading cancer care hospitals. A child of Irish immigrants, she saw the pleasure her mother found in nursing and she followed her into the profession. Now she fears for the future of the health service.

- By David Williamson CHIEF POLITICAL COMMENTATOR

"I'm very passionate about the NHS but it's not working for patients and it's not working for staff at the moment," she warns.

As a health minister she discovered what little control elected politicians have over the sprawling organisation - something she suspects Health Secretary Wes Streeting is also learning.

When working as a nurse she had imagined the changes she would make if she was a minister.

But when she became a minister of the Crown she was “astonished” at the government’s lack of power over the different bodies within the NHS.

“If Wes Streeting said he wanted all GPs to call in their patients tomorrow and do their blood pressures first thing on Monday morning he has no powers to make them do that,” she remarks, adding: “All they do is give funding and ask, ‘Could you spend it on x, y and z?”

The NHS, she warns, “cannot shuffle on as it is at the moment”. She fears a crisis point is coming if patients cannot get the services they seek and staff are unable to provide the quality of care they want to give.

'People don’t appreciate just how all-consuming life as an MP is'

Her worst fear is that people will abandon the NHS and it will only be used by “people who have no other options”.

“That is not what we want at all,” she says.

Her desire for radical change has pushed her out of the Conservatives.

She is now a proud supporter of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

She is by no means the first Tory Brexiteer to have made the switch, and she believes the insurgent party will bring a new spirit of innovation to government.

There are many areas, she argues, where straightforward changes would give citizens choice and freedom.

She remembers “badgering Number 10 about introducing a voucher-style system” to help people find a dentist.