My Medical Gateway Blog

Robert Jenrick’s moving account in the Sunday Telegraph on 9 November 2025 describes his father’s 12-hour wait for stroke treatment and exposes what millions of families now face – an NHS unable to deliver care when it matters most. Jenrick, the Shadow Chancellor and potential future Conservative leader, captures a national story of frustration and quiet resignation – one that echoes what My Medical Gateway has long argued: timely, affordable access to healthcare can’t wait.

In the Sunday Telegraph (9 November 2025), Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Chancellor and widely regarded as the most likely successor to lead the Conservative Party if it performs poorly in the Scottish, Welsh and local elections on 1 May of next year, shared a story that resonates with hard-pressed families across the country.

His 84-year-old father, Bill, suffered a stroke – not once, but twice – and each time he faced the same grim ordeal: hours of waiting in A&E for treatment that should have been immediate. Jenrick describes a night spent in a packed waiting room, where an exhausted manager eventually asked patients who “weren’t very ill” to go home. Those scenes have become tragically familiar. The NHS, he wrote, “just isn’t working.”

He is careful to separate the compassion of frontline staff from the failings of the system itself. His father’s nurse, Sally, comforted a distressed family with a cup of tea – an act of kindness within a service that is often stretched beyond capacity. But goodwill and endurance can only go so far when the structure itself no longer delivers.

Jenrick’s account doesn’t read like the political rhetoric that you might expect from an ambitious frontline politician; it reads like lived reality. His father’s case – a stroke left untreated for 12 hours – highlights the central paradox of the modern NHS: unprecedented funding, yet unacceptable access. As Jenrick points out, the NHS budget, workforce, and headline investment have all increased by around 20 per cent in five years, yet the number of patients treated has grown by less than 2 per cent.

Behind those numbers lie millions of delayed appointments, missed diagnoses, and quiet decisions made by families who can no longer wait.

Jenrick recounts how, when faced with another long NHS delay, his family chose to see a specialist privately. The waiting room, he writes, wasn’t full of the wealthy. It was full of ordinary people – an electrician from Doncaster, a cleaner spending her retirement savings – all making the same reluctant choice: to pay directly for timely treatment.

That moment is precisely what My Medical Gateway (MMG) was built to address. For two years we have said that the future of healthcare will depend on choice, transparency and access beyond national borders. Our model doesn’t replace the NHS – it complements it – by giving UK patients a safe, regulated route to treatment at accredited European hospitals, often within days rather than months.

The reality Jenrick describes has already driven 523,000 people into the overseas self-pay market, with countless others paying extra to secure treatment in the expensive UK private sector. The “double tax” he mentions – paying once through the Treasury and again out of personal savings – is exactly what so many of MMG’s platform users cite when they turn to us. It isn’t about luxury; it’s about urgency, dignity and the right to be treated when it matters most.

Jenrick is right that money isn’t the only issue. Productivity in healthcare depends not just on budgets but on how resources are directed. The NHS today has more administrators than ever before and yet sees fewer patients per clinician. Modernisation projects are paused, capital funds diverted to cover pay rises and strikes, and technology adoption slowed by bureaucracy.

At MMG we’ve long argued that data and efficiency are the missing medicines. In a world where booking a flight or transferring funds can be done instantly, accessing healthcare shouldn’t require a maze of referrals, letters and waiting lists. The same data discipline that drives modern businesses can be brought to patient care.

Jenrick’s father’s experience with stroke care underscores a critical clinical truth: in many conditions, time is treatment. Every hour lost in A&E can mean more lasting damage. The human cost of systemic delay can’t be measured in budgets or staffing charts. It’s measured in lives permanently altered.

At MMG, we speak to patients daily who tell similar stories. Some have waited nearly a year for orthopaedic surgery. Others face months before an oncology consultation. Many have given up entirely on the NHS route. What unites them is a simple sentiment: they can’t wait any longer. Jenrick’s conclusion – that the NHS must be reformed if it is to survive – echoes what we at MMG have said repeatedly: the system will only recover when it accepts that choice is part of the cure. The UK’s ageing population and rising chronic illness rates mean demand will continue to outpace capacity for decades. Pretending otherwise does patients no favours.

That’s why MMG is helping to bridge the gap now, by connecting UK residents directly to world-class European private hospitals that meet EU standards of safety, quality and transparency and offer immediate healthcare at an affordable price.