The lonely death of Dr Jagdip Sidhu

Jagdip Sidhu was the platonic ideal of an NHS doctor. He took very little private work, despite it being common for consultants. His only exception was for those who needed urgent care that couldn’t get treated on the NHS. It was a point of ethics. “He said: I’m only going to do it for people who clinically cannot wait,” explains Amandip, Jagdip's brother. “I’m not going to sit and profit off people’s adverse health and misery.”

But the hospital was impossible to get away from. On days and nights off, he would get urgent messages from the managers at his NHS trust asking him to clear more beds on the ward or hit new performance targets. Gradually, he had less time for anything outside of work. He’d developed “tunnel vision”, as Amandip describes it.

By 2017, something had broken in him. “He had just suddenly aged,” recalls his brother, pausing for a moment before continuing. “It’s very hard to explain. But for someone who had a lot of vitality in life and charisma about him, it started to drain away.” His hair began to turn grey. He was constantly tired, surviving on just three or four hours of sleep each night and often working more than 14 hours a day. “He’d come and see mum and literally just pass out on the sofa,” recalls Amandip. He spoke less and less. Jagdip was also losing faith in the medical system whose values he once embodied, and confided to his brother that he thought the struggling NHS was “finished”. 

One day, Amandip got a call from his brother. “I saw his number flash up, and I knew something was wrong,” he recalls. Jagdip explained that he had been signed off work on medical leave after nurses he worked with noticed he was struggling to function. He was petrified. “He said: ‘I can’t ever go back to that hospital. They’ll crucify me. They’ll say ‘you made mistakes’, and I’ll be struck off’,” recalls Amandip. “Because he was signed off sick, he felt that he couldn’t be a doctor anymore. That was his identity as an adult human being forcibly stopped, outside of his control.”

One afternoon, Amandip received an email from Jagdip. It was a confusing list of instructions, including how to access his financial accounts, life insurance policies, when to get the car MOT’d. There was no explanation. It ended with a short sign-off — he had gone to Beachy Head, a beauty spot atop the cliffs of the South Coast, with the car.

As call after call went straight to voicemail, the panic started to set in. Jagdip called Jagdip’s wife — there was no sign of him at home. He had left without taking his wallet and house keys. Amandip raced across London to his brother’s house. When he arrived, it was already crawling with police. They had found the car by Beachy Head, but there was no sign of Jagdip.

An agonising two hours later, he heard the crackle of the officers’ radio as they walked into the room and started to speak. “I remember them saying ‘This is the part of the job I really hate’,” Amandip recalls. They had found his brother’s body, identified by the car keys that were still in his pocket. Jagdip was 47 years old.

There were a lot of questions in the blur of weeks and months afterwards. But above all, one thought haunts Amandip: did his brother’s job in the NHS play a role in his death?

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Source: The Londoner, 15 March 2025