The House | Sonia Kumar MP On Training Physiotherapists In A War Zone And Why She Quit The NHS

Sonia Kumar, Labour MP for Dudley (UK Parliament)

9 min read10 min

Your phone is buzzing. It’s not a work message on WhatsApp, nor the latest surreal news story trending on X. It’s an air raid app telling you to take shelter in the nearest bunker – a telltale sign, these days, that you are presently in a war zone.

Physiotherapist-turned-politician Sonia Kumar travelled to Ukraine in February. Going against Foreign Office advice, but briefed on safety and armed with burner phones provided by Parliament, she brought with her a group of hand-picked clinicians. They were all there to make a direct impact on the war by delivering practical healthcare training to Ukrainian clinicians.

“The hospitality of Ukrainians was second to none. They made sure that we were looked after; that we knew where the security was. We all had the app on our phones,” she explains. “It would tell you when to… well, to run, essentially.”

Kumar kept the schedule tight and timed the trip with the four-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, which she thought would be safest, as lots of foreign dignitaries would be visiting then. She turned out to be spot-on: there was just a single 10-minute air raid during their stay, but an uptick as soon as they left: “They had five or six on that Wednesday night, when we’d come back.”

The idea for the mission had come to her during an earlier trip to Ukraine, in September last year, as part of a delegation of MPs to see Save the Children. “I spoke to children who had been stolen from Ukraine by Russia, and I just saw the devastation that had caused,” she recalls.

One stop on the visit was a rehab centre. “I spoke to a gentleman who’d had a bilateral amputation, and he sat up in his bed, clearly in a lot of pain, and said, ‘I’d do it all over again.’ He goes, ‘If I could go back on that frontline and fight, I would do that.’ I was struck by the resilience, the strength and the courage that was coming through in every conversation.”

I only had two days of training. That’s when I knew that the NHS needed to change

When Kumar spoke to the clinicians, she found them easy to relate to and thought: “We’re back to my bread and butter.” She realised that physiotherapists in Ukraine (called ‘physical therapists’ there), unlike the UK, are not chartered – there is little governance and they have minimal autonomy. Here, physios do full university courses, whereas they receive only short courses before being deployed.

“We have a very big scope,” she says of NHS physiotherapists, who are first-contact practitioners. “I was doing MRIs, nerve conduction studies, bloods… In Wales, in particular, there’s someone who has started doing surgery. You’ve got those who do surgery, like carpal tunnel release. Then we’ve got people who do injections, and some who prescribe.” Their counterparts in Ukraine, she learned, still go through GPs for prescriptions.

“So, I floated the idea. I said, ‘What would you think about clinicians coming over to do some teaching?’ And they bit my arm off!”

The group of British clinicians flew from London to Poland, then took the overnight train to Kyiv. They stayed at a hotel but conducted the two-day training course in a “very deserted” place that looked “quite rundown”.

“I won’t go through the exact details for obvious reasons,” Kumar says, wisely showing more caution than the Ministry of Defence, which recently had to pull down a video – featuring a minister – that showed the outside of a facility in Ukraine and risked allowing the Russians to geolocate it.

“It has been a logistical nightmare to say the least,” she adds. “Things evolve so quickly that you never know whether you’re definitely going or not.”

When she asked what kind of clinicians they wanted, they requested musculoskeletal (MSK) care, which was fortunate as she has a wide network of physios. Training of this type would enable their clinicians to treat soldiers without pulling them off the frontline.

The soldiers often get the same type of injuries as sportspeople, she explains, because they do similar repetitive movements. The Ukrainians are seeing ankle sprains; back or spinal pain from heavy lifting; shoulder pain from holding up drones.

Ukrainian soldiers also suffer neurological conditions, which UK physios can address as they look for those symptoms too. “We’ll look at your sensation, strength, reflexes, tone, facial nerve testing. We also look at masqueraders – something that can come in looking like a shoulder pain but could be a tumour or a cancer.” And the soldiers on the frontline in Ukraine are all ages, so acquire all the conditions seen in the general population.

Kumar says the Ukrainians have concluded, from the number of such injuries, that the Russians are deliberately shooting at the sciatic nerve area in their legs so that they lose their limbs.

Of the 300 clinicians who applied to attend the Continuing Professional Development-accredited course, there was space for just 25 to take part. “They travelled in from all over the place to come, risking their safety as well.”

The MP believes the exercise was forward-looking for Britain too: “They’re dealing with really high-level burns and plastics. Now, I did do that in my training session, but that might be important if we were ever to go into a war, for us to be war-ready… There’s a lot to learn from Ukraine.”

Kumar is the daughter of greengrocers, though she professes to have nothing else in common with Margaret Thatcher.

“My mum and dad came from India with nothing, and I think that story probably resonates with lots of ethnic minorities in the UK. My mum and dad were extremely thankful for all that Britain gave us: education to me and my siblings; the NHS; community; love and support.”

They worked “day and night” to be successful. And while politics was “never presented as a career option”, she knew she wanted to pursue something meaningful. “I didn’t want to just make money.”

She summons a memory of being aged 10 or 11, on a train in India: “I was looking at the poverty there and all the shacks that people had built. And I remember having this really vivid moment in my head that I wanted to make more of a difference. That’s always stayed with me.”

She settled on healthcare. “I knew I didn’t like blood”, though, so physiotherapy it was. Reality was more complicated, however.

A band-five junior physiotherapist, 21 years old and fresh out of uni, Kumar was put on the on-call rota. She had two call-outs.

“One was a woman I could hear soon as I walked into the ward. I didn’t think she was going to make it.” The doctor on call asked her to “make the patient comfortable”, saying: “She’s not going to make it. We can’t escalate her. There aren’t any beds. So, this is what you’ve got. This is your patient.”

“You could hear her barely breathing. It was that awful sound I will never forget,” Kumar continues. She had a cardiac condition and pneumonia. “We ended up stabilising her, and she actually went back to a care home, which was brilliant. But that hour and a half of my life…”

The other call-out was for a young baby in intensive care with an undiagnosed neurological condition.

“I was doing respiratory care on the ward at that time. It was two o’clock in the morning. The consultant called me out to help with her breathing, and it was quite devastating to go out as a junior physiotherapist – I only had two days of training. That’s when I knew that the NHS needed to change… You have to be a certain type of person to manage children that unwell.”

“I was horrified that that was all I was going to get,” she adds, referring to the mere two days of training. “I had some shadowing, but even so. I don’t think any mother or father or guardian would want their child to have only a physiotherapist managing their critically unwell child, at two o’clock in the morning, after a couple of days of training.”

Kumar walked out of the hospital, burst into tears and realised: “This is not for me.”

She moved on from that NHS trust, which she won’t name, and worked at King’s, “a phenomenal hospital”. (They had digital notes there from the 1990s, she notes, whereas in the West Midlands it was all handwritten even just a few years ago.) “And then they tried to put me in ITU – that’s when I left!” she laughs.

After securing other jobs, including at London’s Royal Free Hospital, where she did admin then led the physio team, she wanted something different. One day she simply quit and returned home to live with her parents.

I have no political blood… I just wanted to make more of a difference than seeing my 16 patients a day

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“I joined the party. I thought maybe that’s one avenue to go through. Absolutely loved the 2019 general election – maybe not great for Labour, but I just really enjoyed the experience of campaigning. I then stood for council two years later, and that was it. It was incredible to have two people mentoring me.”

She will not name the pair of Labour mentors – “one of them is very high profile” – but The House already knows she is close to Pat McFadden and Seema Malhotra; she offers only another giggle in response.

Having become Labour MP for Dudley in 2024 with a majority of less than 2,000, Kumar has now reached the rank of parliamentary private secretary, which she calls “an honour”. Being avowedly non-factional, she is not a member of any Labour parliamentary group, even the middle-of-the-road Tribune. “I’m just me.”

Instead, her politics are clearly rooted in her upbringing. Describing her childhood above a shop in Stockland Green, which she calls “one of the worst areas in Birmingham”, she stresses: “I have no political blood. I haven’t had a dynasty of Labour giants or any politicians prior to coming in. I just wanted to make more of a difference than seeing my 16 patients a day.”

“I’m a Labour MP, I have Labour values, I believe in the NHS,” is how she sums up her outlook. “If you said to me about touching the NHS, there would be a riot.”

She is being forced to give up chairing the Allied Health Professional and Osteoporosis APPGs as a result of her promotion to the frontbench, but Kumar is hoping to pick up clinical shifts while serving in Parliament. “I’d like to keep my hand in – I think it’ll keep me humble.”