Thakshayini, 40, Birmingham
Occupation Oncologist
Voting record Historically, “whatever wasn’t Conservative”. Her new rule is “not Reform or the Conservatives”
Amuse bouche She is bilingual in English and Tamil, speaks decent French, German and Japanese, a little bit of Spanish, and could pull out ancient Greek and Latin “if required”
Maimuna, 24, Birmingham
Occupation Education programmes assistant at a medical charity
Voting record She’s a Conservative party member but, because of Boris Johnson and the direction of the party, voted Labour in the last two elections
Amuse bouche Last year while on a pub crawl in Copenhagen, someone asked if she was running the marathon the following week. “I said no, I’d only just started running!” In May, she returned to Copenhagen and ran it
For starters
Thakshayini I was nervous, partly because I was expecting some rabid rightwinger, but she wasn’t at all. She was perfectly nice.
Maimuna We quickly started chatting about the NHS strikes; it was really interesting to hear her perspective.
Thakshayini I had crab toast, which came with a nice bisque, then chicken. For dessert I had panna cotta with strawberries. And lovely mocktails.
Maimuna I had a mushroom parfait, a steak, two glasses of oaky chardonnay and a chocolate dessert. Delicious.
The big beef
Maimuna I was concerned that the NHS is bad at retaining doctors, and relying on foreign doctors is an incentive not to train people. She said it’s just as expensive to train doctors from abroad, as their qualifications might not translate to the UK system.
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Thakshayini She said we should just train up English people. But the problem with that is training people isn’t about cost, it’s that the doctor jobs that need to be filled don’t have much career progression, so people don’t apply for them. You can’t force people to take those jobs, so we offer them to applicants from abroad.
Maimuna I based it on people I knew at medical school saying they wanted to leave for somewhere with better pay.
Thakshayini My dad had almost 20 years of experience when we moved here, and he had to take an entry-level doctor job. I was five and my sister was three, and we’re now both doctors. So that’s two homegrown doctors who are only here because an immigrant was given one of those jobs.
Sharing plate
Maimuna I’m really into fitness, and I think the food industry is massively predatory, but we agreed that size doesn’t always correlate with health. I asked if people from other ethnic groups, such as Asian or Black, present with health issues at lower BMIs compared with white people. She said yes, but that genetics is also a factor.
Thakshayini I talked about the differences across populations; there’s a correlation between diabetes and weight, but also between diabetes and race, and obesity and race – we don’t know enough to unpick it. But doctors still tell patients like me, “You’ve got pain because you’re fat, lose weight”, then it turns out it was something else.
For afters
Maimuna Assisted dying is against my religion, but I worry there would be instances where people would do it because they feel they are a burden. Dying is the one thing guaranteed to happen to everyone. Why rush it? A survey from the British Medical Association found that doctors were in favour of assisted dying, apart from those working in palliative and geriatric care. Thakshayini said she’s not in those areas of medicine herself, but wondered if some had concerns that assisted dying might move resources away from palliative care.
Thakshayini As a patient, I’d want that option if it came down to it. As a doctor, it would be really difficult to be involved as a cause of a patient’s death, even if that was something they wanted.
Takeaways
Maimuna I really enjoyed speaking to Thakshayini. It was really nice to get insights from someone who is different to me, but more involved in the NHS than I am.
Thakshayini I wasn’t clear on the basis for some of Maimuna’s opinions. In that way she felt quite young to me. But one thing we bonded over is despising Reform. If there are more people like her in the Conservative party, maybe they can give Reform some competition!
Additional reporting: Kitty Drake
