I’ve always said my journey into politics was forged in the NHS, where I worked as a district nurse for 25 years. Day after day, I saw the disparities in our health system, the barriers to access, the gaps in outcomes, and the quiet neglect that our communities endured. That experience didn’t just shape my career, it ignited a fire in me to challenge systemic inequity head-on.
As Cabinet Member for Health and Social Care on Birmingham City Council, I fought for policies that tackled the root causes of health inequality, such as housing, poverty, and discrimination that disproportionately devastates Black communities. But it was during the COVID-19 pandemic that the brutal reality of these inequities became impossible to ignore.
The Birmingham and Lewisham African Caribbean Health Inequalities Review (BLACHIR), which I led, exposed a harsh truth, Black and Asian communities bore the brunt of COVID-19, suffering higher death rates as frontline workers. Our mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters were forced to risk their lives in low-paid, insecure jobs because they had no choice. The pandemic didn’t create these injustices; it exposed and amplified them.
Today, as Vice Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee and Chair of the APPG on Black Health, I continue this fight. Black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Sickle cell disease, a condition disproportionately affecting Black communities, remains underfunded and overlooked. Black women suffer in silence with fibroids and reproductive health conditions, while research and treatment lags far behind.
This isn’t just a failure of our health service; it’s a failure of trust. It’s about who gets heard, whose pain is believed, and who holds power in the decisions that shape our lives. Discrimination isn’t always a shouted slur; sometimes, it’s a system that ignores our pain, underfunds our needs, and silences our voices.
But leadership demands more than just outrage. It demands courage. It demands action. It means standing firm when the odds are stacked against you. It means demanding answers when lives are lost through neglect or indifference. And it means fighting not just for words of solidarity, for targeted funding, research, and policies that truly save lives.
More than 30 years of fighting for health equity has taught me that our power lies in our pride, and our pride lies in our refusal to accept injustice. Whether in politics, our health system, or our daily lives, we must strive for leadership in all spaces, we must lead with conviction, because “a man who stands for nothing will fall for anything”.
And we, as a community, stand for justice. We stand for equity. And we stand for the unshakable truth that we matter too, in every hospital ward, every waiting room, and every decision made about our lives.