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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