A member since October 2024, and the only qualified nurse, Hamilton brings a unique insight to the Health and Social Care Committee.

‘I have my skills that I think add value, but also with my being a nurse that's come from an ethnic minority background, my leaning tends to be around equality,' Hamilton told me.

‘Is it fair? Is it equitable and why is the service being removed? Why are we not moving more towards prevention? Why are we always being reactive as a health service? I do tend to challenge those areas.'

Social care

Hamilton's background as a councillor, including being chair of a Health and Well-Being Board for seven years, makes her well-qualified to interrogate the Government over its inaction on social care, which was the theme of the committee's report published in May 2025.

The Labour MP said she was ‘very concerned' about further delay to social care reform, with the Casey Commission not set to submit its final findings until 2028, given the gravity of the current crisis and its knock-on effects on the NHS.

The Casey Commission is scheduled to publish its initial findings later this year but Hamilton said she was not even confident this deadline would be met.

‘I am not sure if she is going to be reporting because of all the stuff Casey's been doing in other areas,' Hamilton reflected.

Baroness Casey led a national audit into grooming gangs that was published in June 2025 and there were rumours she may lead that inquiry but these were scotched with the appointment of Baroness Longfield as chair in December.

Hamilton revealed the committee planned to bring Baroness Casey back in the summer for an update on progress.

The Labour MP voiced concern at the lack of updates the committee had so far received regarding progress.

‘We haven't seen what's happening with the review and we've not had even a proper catch up with her,' Hamilton said.

‘I think our chair may have met her on a one-to-one level, but I've not met her at all, so I don't know where she's headed.'

She revealed the committee would launch a new inquiry in early March on how the social care crisis has driven the rise in corridor care.

In its inquiry recommendations, the committee called for financial support for unpaid carers, while Hamilton described the money set aside for the social care workforce in its Fair Pay Agreement as ‘pretty limited'.

She emphasised the ongoing pressures on the NHS would continue to drive calls for urgent action on social care.

‘If you look at what's happening in in the health service, a lot of it is around bed blocking and people not being able to get back home quickly enough because services are still being set up,' Hamilton said.

‘It's about care homes and there not being the places to get them home, while social workers haven't been able to assess them quickly.

‘There's also simple things such as medication. They've not been able to get their medication quickly enough to get them out of hospitals.

‘We need to unblock that blocked system if we are going to see major improvements within the hospital setting.'

Prevention shift

Having been a district nurse for 25 years, Hamilton said the shift to a preventative model based on home-based care was essential if the NHS was to remain sustainable.

‘We have to make that shift towards communities and galvanising local groups and our neighbours and others,' she noted.

Hamilton also advocated direct payments as a means of providing personalised care in the community.

The MP also said incentives and support for ICBs would be essential to delivering the left shift.

‘I do think strategic commissioning is going to be vital, but it's more than that,' Hamilton added.

‘It's about understanding your community, and this is where strategic commissioning is really important, but it's also about understanding where you can add the best value.'

First 1,000 days

Having led the committee's inquiry on providing the best support for children during their first 1,000 days, Hamilton said she strongly supported family hubs but said there needed to be more of them with a bigger workforce.

‘We found health visitors were carrying caseloads of 750 plus and it was too many for them to give the time and the connections that they needed to give to families,' she highlighted.

One of the committee's recommendations was to increase the number of health visitors to 1,000 in order to cut individual case loads to 250.

Noting the national drop in vaccinations, the committee also recommended an increase in the statutory requirement for visits from health visitors from five to six, as is the case in Wales, as well as a reinstatement of the 95% vaccination target, which Hamilton said had become little more than an aspiration.

‘Health visitors could go out and do more visits, and people have more connections with them,' she argued. ‘They could do the education that's needed so we could get more children vaccinated to meet those targets, where, at the moment, that just isn't happening.'

Hamilton said family hubs could be key to increasing access to health visitors in large urban areas such as her native Birmingham.

‘How do you know what's going on in a household if you don't get to know the mother?' she asked.

‘I had five children. I knew my health visitor by name and if I was struggling I could pick up the phone and even if she wasn't in I knew she would get back to me.

‘That just doesn't exist at the moment.'

Maternity care

Hamilton also led the committee's report on inequalities in black maternity care, an issue she feels equally passionate about.

‘What has always upset me, and it's never left me, is that people felt scared and weren't able to discuss things with the professionals,' she said.

‘If you want an equality of access then people must feel that they can access a service and people understand their needs and wants.'

One of her inquiry's recommendations was around leadership training and development.

‘We found that leaders were so far removed from what was going on in the maternity suite that they didn't understand what mothers were going through,' Hamilton explained.  

The committee vice-chair noted the example of one mother she had seen on a hospital visit whose mental health issues were ignored.

‘That would have had a massive impact on the care she needed when the child was born and it was because they didn't look at her in a holistic manner,' the MP said.

Concluding, Hamilton said there was an awful lot of work to do on implementing leadership and culture change to increase equality of frontline maternity access, adding she waited eagerly on the conclusions of the Baroness Amos inquiry.