India, UK natural partners in future of healthcare: Preet Kaur Gill

Her father drove buses in Birmingham. Her mother stitched clothes for a living. They had come from Punjab with little else than the hope that England might offer their children something the village of Jamsher in Jalandhar could not. What they could not have imagined—and perhaps no one could—is that their eldest daughter would one day sit in the British government and shape the future of the health service there. Read Full Story Preet Kaur Gill was appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department of Health and Social Care on May 12. She was one of seven appointments announced that day. Gill is the first woman British Sikh MP in the history of the House of Commons. Her appointment deepens a pattern of South Asian representation that has become one of the more striking features of the Keir Starmer government. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood, of Pakistani descent, has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in the cabinet. Lisa Nandy serves as culture secretary, the first Labour cabinet minister of Indian origin. Seema Malhotra is the minister for equalities. Kanishka Narayan serves as parliamentary under-secretary of state for AI and online safety. Gill’s appointment to health adds another name to a generation of South Asian politicians who have moved from the margins of British public life to its very centre. She arrived at this brief carrying something that most ministers do not: a lived understanding of what it means to need a health system, and to find it wanting. In her first interview since the appointment, given exclusively to INDIA TODAY, Gill sets out a sweeping reformist vision for UK’s Health Service (NHS), one driven by AI and preventive care, a tighter framework for patient safety, and a deepening partnership with India that she believes could reshape how both countries deliver healthcare in the decades ahead. “The biggest challenge,” she says, “is ensuring that NHS remains both sustainable and equitable in the face of rising demand. We are dealing with an ageing population, growing long-term conditions, workforce pressures, and the need to modernise systems that were not designed for the digital age,” says Gill. But this, she insists, is not solely a story of strain. It is also a story of timing, and the timing, she argues, may be unusually good. AI, genomics, advanced diagnostics and digital care platforms are beginning to reshape the contours of healthcare delivery, shifting emphasis from episodic treatment towards prevention, prediction and personalisation. For policymakers, this creates both a technical and a political challenge: how to integrate new tools into a system built on universality, equity and clinical conservatism. India, which is simultaneously building out its own digital health architecture under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission while managing one of the world’s largest and most complex patient populations, faces a version of this same challenge at far greater scale and with far fewer resources per capita. “This is also a moment of enormous opportunity,” says Gill. “Advances in AI, diagnostics, genomics and digital healthcare can help us move from a reactive system to a more preventative and personalised model of care. The challenge is making sure innovation reaches every patient, not just a few regions or hospitals.” That distinction between technological advancement and equitable access runs through much of her early framing of the portfolio. Innovation, she suggests, is no longer the constraint. Distribution is. The question is not whether new technologies exist, but how they are embedded across an unequal and geographically diverse healthcare landscape without amplifying existing disparities. It is a question India has been grappling with for decades as the gap between healthcare in its metropolitan centres and its rural hinterland remains one of the most stubborn challenges facing the public health system. This balance becomes especially sensitive in the context of AI, where adoption has accelerated faster than regulatory frameworks in many countries. The UK has already begun integrating AI tools in diagnostics, imaging and administrative systems, but concerns over transparency, bias and clinical accountability remain central to policy debate. For Gill, the emphasis is on controlled acceleration rather than unrestricted deployment. Public trust, she argues, remains the essential currency of healthcare reform. “People need confidence that new technologies are clinically safe, ethically governed and properly regulated,” she says. “The role of government is to create a framework where innovation can move faster without compromising transparency, accountability or patient safety. That includes robust oversight of AI systems, clear standards for health data governance and ensuring clinicians remain central to decision-making.” Gill is also direct about one of the most politically charged risks of AI in healthcare—the danger of algorithmic bias. “We have