Dr Peter Prinsley, MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, lays out what it's like to be in Parliament.

Suffolk News

Dr Peter Prinsley, MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, lays out what it's like to be in Parliament and how it differs from his former life as an NHS doctor.

Transcript

00:01It has now been a year since Labour's landslide election victory,

00:05and for Dr Peter Prinsley, who overturned a 25,000 vote deficit,

00:09this meant swapping the operating room for the halls of Parliament,

00:13an experience he promised to bring to his new life as a politician.

00:17In Bury St Edmunds we urgently need to confirm the capital funding

00:21to progress the replacement of the West Suffolk Hospital,

00:24which like my own James Padgett University Hospital in Great Yarmouth

00:28and our sister hospital in Kings Lynn is supported by thousands of scaffolding poles,

00:33literally falling down.

00:35But what is it like being an MP? And how does it compare to being a doctor?

00:40It's completely different. Everything's changed.

00:43I used to have a timetable, and I knew what I was doing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday

00:50because I had clinics and operating lists, and I knew what I was doing in the hospital.

00:57I didn't necessarily know exactly what was going to happen to all the patients,

00:59but I knew exactly where I was going to be and what I would be doing.

01:02And that has completely changed, because every day is different.

01:06I travel a lot. I mean, I sort of sometimes feel as if I live on the railway line.

01:11One of the extraordinary things about this job is you do get to have one-to-one conversations with the people running the country.

01:17So I do feel as if they have noticed that there are some doctors, and not just doctors,

01:24we've got some senior nurses who have come into Parliament, and I do sense that we do have something of the ear of the ministers.

01:36I do actually think that we're probably making more noise, not just for Suffolk, but for East Anglia generally,

01:43than has been the case up until now.

01:46And I think that's partly because we've suddenly got a big group of new MPs,

01:52many of whom were really trying to make their mark.

01:55And I think that we did have a situation in which we'd had quite a lot of MPs from the Conservative Party

02:05who'd been MPs for a very long time.

02:07And I think perhaps there was a sense that some of them have slightly run out of steam.

02:13Whereas I think we've got a lot of rather enthusiastic new young MPs now.

02:17I'm not one of the young MPs, but I am one of the enthusiastic ones.

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