'I will find peace knowing my husband's death was avoidable. He should be here today - but we can't go back... we have to go forwards'

Dr Shivani Tanna has been working in the NHS for 18 years. ‘Everything [she] always had concerns about played out’ in the care of her husband, who died after NHS hospital failures. A passionate doctor from a circle of acclaimed medics, Dr Tanna was thrust into life ‘on the other side’ as a ‘patient and a relative’ when her husband, Professor Amit Patel, was struck by a life-threatening illness.

That experience, the devastated mum-of-two claims, ‘corroborates what [her] own patients have told [her] about the fact that, currently, the NHS is not fit for purpose’.

In the wake of her husband's death, Dr Tanna says his case reveals fundamental issues in the health service. “We have been indoctrinated as doctors, service users, and as a society in general to believe that this is a wonderful entity and we are so lucky to have a national health service," she says.

“However, nobody wants to address the elephant in the room - that it is operating on less than full staff constantly... there is so much poor practice that it’s become normalised."

READ MORE: An extraordinary doctor who should have been allowed to be an ordinary patient

Prof Patel had spent years becoming 'one of the best doctors in the UK', treating some of the most unwell cancer patients at the world-renowned Christie Hospital in Manchester. In August 2021, he was admitted to Wythenshawe Hospital after becoming gravely ill.

In almost incalculable odds, Prof Patel rapidly started to realise his life was in danger from the illness in which he had trained to be a national expert. Yet those scrambling to treat the professor admitted they 'had never heard of' the condition and would 'read about it', according to evidence heard at an inquest into his death last month.