A NHS worker told of becoming suicidal from overwork as GMB Congress demanded ministers commit to ending privatisation today.

Sheffield children's hospital worker Sarah Young told delegates in Brighton: “In February a GMB member signed off ill from their NHS trust with work related stress ... covering more than one area and more work than they could manage.

“When that member got home they sat at their kitchen table and looked at their medication and thought: that’s really easy to do.”

“They didn’'t, they got help from their daughter, who was an NHS mental health nurse and from their GP.

“They are recovering. Congress, that member is me.”

The GMB North East, Yorkshire and Humber delegate was speaking in support of a union statement on the NHS, which was passed unanimously.

Ambulance worker Mohammad Akbar said: “My work in the ambulance service really is a matter of life and death.

“It should not be a place of profit, spin and cost-cutting exercises.

“The market has absolutely no place here — some things are more important than money.”

Addressing the government, the statement says: “GMB members are demanding a commitment to ending privatisation, bringing all outsourced services like cleaning, catering and facilities back in-house, as well as removing private-sector influence from care boards.”

It warns that ministers will have a “crisis of legitimacy if they choose a path of further privatisation of the NHS,” calling for a “clear commitment from this Labour government to the nation that the NHS will be enshrined as a fully publicly owned and publicly funded, free at the point of demand health services, as envisaged by Aneurin Bevan in the Attlee government.”

It adds that plans to abolish NHS England cannot repeat previous cost-cutting exercises that saw “basic necessities such as equipment and uniforms cut from budgets ... significant wastage of drugs and medicines just left to expire.”

Aneira Thomas, the first baby to be born on the NHS, told delegates “it really made me cry” to see NHS workers going on pay strikes in recent years.

“We will continue to protect, maintain and cherish the NHS by respecting why it was set up in the first place in 1948,” she said.