A LABOUR MP and qualified doctor has admitted she struggled to get out of bed after seeing Covid-19 patients die in hospital.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, the shadow minister for mental health, reflected upon her experiences while attending hospital wards at London’s Nightingale and St George’s hospitals. They were both overwhelmed with patients during the peak of the pandemic.
Allin-Khan, an A&E doctor, dropped her Labour party deputy leadership campaign to do 12-hour shifts. She has had the experience of providing humanitarian aid in Gaza, Israel, Africa and Asia – but she revealed that the coronavirus pandemic really had a big impact on her.
“There was a week, and I was like, wow, I just feel as though it’s a little harder to get out of bed than normal. And I just feel like I could quite happily stay in the same clothes for a few days, and I don’t feel great,” she said during The Telegraph’s Mad World podcast last week. “I realised that I needed to grieve – a lot of the people that I’d seen die, a lot of the times I’d held it in for the families that I was seeing who looked and sounded like me with parents that looked and sounded like mine.”
The Tooting MP went on to share the harrowing experience medics go through – including delivering the death of a patient to their family members.
“What floored me immeasurably in this crisis was as a doctor and as a nurse, compassion is natural to you,” she said. “It’s an innate thing giving someone a hug, putting a hand on their arm. All of these things are just so natural when people are grieving. But instead, you are talking to people through full PPE, asking them to stand two metres away from you or delivering the very worst of news over the phone to them.
“Or if they are able to come to the hospital to say goodbye as their loved-one is dying, five family members show up and then you have to, in your full PPE, say, I’m sorry, only one of you can come in.”
Workers clean communication equipment aboard INS Surat on January 11