Doctor reveals stress of virus front line

DR Zahid Chauhan has lost friends and colleagues to Covid-19.

The part-time GP, who is a director for BARDOC, the out-of-hours GP service for Rochdale, Bury and Bolton, has seen others fighting for life in intensive care.

He’s gone from working just a few days a week, juggling his medical duties with his role on Oldham council cabinet, to being on call ‘more or less 24 hours a day.’

Unsuprisingly his experiences on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic have caused anxiety and led to a fair bit of soul-searching.

But Dr Chauhan says he’s also seen how the crisis has shown the best of our communities and brought home just how vital our key workers are.

Here, in his own words, Dr Chauhan describes his experiences during the pandemic:

“Since coronavirus, I’m on call more or less 24 hours. I get phone calls at four o’clock in the morning if I’m not already at the workplace.

“We might have issues day to day, on a daily basis we might be trying to convince a colleague the PPE you’ve got is enough to go and see their patient, trying to convince a driver who carries a doctor to say ‘no, you are safe,’ might be trying to find GPs to do certain things - and then at the same time go into the acute clinics for Covid and see those patients.

“Initially it was really worrying, because you come home and see your children, so you learn to change your life, you don’t allow your kids to hug you... but, you get a bit anxious as well.

“You come home and then you read in the newspapers and things that your colleagues have died, you have experience of people you know closely being on ventilators and some of them die, and you think, ‘what’s going to happen with me, with my family?’

“But you remember, that if you don’t do it, who else is going to do it?

“As clinical leadership, you need to set an example.

“I’ve had dreams where I’ve seen myself on ventilators, I’ve had dreams of writing my own will, it always happens after seeing or hearing about the death of a colleague.

“On the other side, positive side, the huge satisfaction you get by helping people who need you most. It’s worth doing it even if only for that reason.

“I’ve tried to do my best to fulfil my social responsibility.

“It’s not easy to sit at home and be locked into the house, that’s the most difficult thing to do.

“It’s not easy to be a carer, and work on minimum wage and go and look after the most vulnerable people, and also being vulnerable yourself and worrying about infections and things.

“It’s not easy to be a bin man, and go and collect the bins of people who might be infected, or have contaminated surfaces.

“It’s not easy to be working nights as admin people to support your health and social care colleagues.

“It’s not a doctor or a nurse who can singlehandedly help you and care about you, it’s hundreds of people who put themselves at risk, who work on minimum wage to deliver the best care.

“This is not the time to divide us, but this is definitely going to be a time where we should reflect on what our needs are and reflect from our mistakes, and say what do we need to do to reinvest in our social care, reinvest in our health system, reinvest in our other services and deal with social deprivation, deal with austerity and many other things.

“I’m sure we are going to have analysis of the coronavirus crisis afterwards and I hope that politicians are going to be brave enough to stand up and say sorry, we thought this was the best way, but I wish we would have done this.”