‘I put the blame firmly on the Government’
◆ Dr Amir Khan, resident doctor on ITV’S Lorraine, talks to Hannah Stephenson about standing up for junior doctors and his new book aimed at children
Being thrown into the TV spotlight has not always been an easy thing for Dr Amir Khan, GP and resident doctor for ITV’S Lorraine and Good Morning Britain.
“I have been trolled and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t affected by negative comments on Twitter, although I get less of them now,” says the genial doctor, 42, who remains a full-time GP in Bradford.
His latest book, How Families Are Made, aimed at six-to-nine-year-olds, is a truly inclusive exploration of different families, including heterosexual couples, stepparents, foster and adoptive parents and same-sex couples, as well as a gentle introduction to sex education and basic explanations of how babies are made, touching on surrogacy and sperm banks, natural births and Caesareans.
The message in the book, though, is inclusivity, which is something very close to the TV GP’S heart.
As a child of Asian immigrants, he was born in Bradford, the son of a bus driver and a social worker. He is proud of his British Pakistani heritage, but has encountered racism throughout his life.
“I think anyone from a historically marginalised background has encountered some form of prejudice and racism and I have certainly encountered that throughout my life growing up and even now.
“I’ve had patients refuse to see me because I’m an Asian doctor. I’ve had comments made to me using the ‘P’ word when I’ve been growing up.”
When he publicly stands up for animal rights or voices his views against hunting for pleasure he is attacked on social media.
“I get a whole barrage of racist abuse about how I don’t understand British culture and British values, even though I’m very British. It’s sad, but you learn to live alongside it because it happens; micro-aggressions happening on a on a daily basis and macro-aggressions happening every fortnight at least. When you put stuff out there, it invites it in, which isn’t right, but it happens.”
However, the social media trolls do not deter him from putting across his views.
“If I feel passionately about something I will say it as it is. I’ve said very politically motivated things. I didn’t agree with Matt Hancock being in the jungle. I didn’t agree with all the things we did around Covid and I was very vocal about that on Lorraine and on Good Morning Britain.
“For the past 13 years the country has been ravaged by this government and the NHS has been completely dismantled. I’ve been working in the NHS for 20 years and I’ve known the good times, but now it’s bad – bad for patients and bad for the people who work in it.”
As a trainer of GPS, he’s been in support of the junior doctors’ strikes. Responding to claims that there have been excess deaths after the strikes, he says: “People have died because of the doctors’ strike but people were dying because of waiting for services as well and waiting to be seen in hospital when there weren’t strikes.
“If we want a high-quality health service where you get seen in a timely fashion, and patients are looked after well and safely, we’ve got to staff it properly and we’ve got to pay our staff properly.
“The doctors didn’t want to strike, patients didn’t die just because they (the doctors) took a day off work. They died because the doctors had no other choice. They’d tried every type of negotiation and it hadn’t worked. I would put
the blame very firmly on the Government.”
Despite his feelings about the state of the NHS, he says he wouldn’t consider going into private practice at this point in time, although offers are made to him frequently.
“I’m NHS through and through and I firmly believe in the idea of healthcare free at the point of need. And where I work, you see why that’s so important.”
The diversity of families in his book mirror those he sees in his Bradford clinic, he says, stressing the importance of introducing children to facts about the evolution of family life before they are exposed to misinformation and inappropriate content online.
While it is aimed at six-to-nine-year-olds, Khan says:
“It’s one of those debates that lots of adults and parents have: when is it appropriate to have a conversation with a young person about where babies come from?”
He confesses that he learned the facts of life from his school friends rather than his parents. “I grew up with six sisters and my dad died when I was fairly young – and we are a Muslim family. These kinds of conversations didn’t happen in our house.”
The information he gleaned from his mates was incorrect and inappropriate, he recalls. “I’d be on the back of a coach with my friend who was showing me stuff in magazines that I should not have been looking at.”
As a full-time GP – he shoehorns his TV work in between his NHS commitments and has also found time in the past few years to write a memoir and a novel – he has a hugely busy schedule, and says he doesn’t juggle it all very well.
“I don’t see very many of my friends any more, I don’t sleep as much as I would like to. I’m still trying to find the balance, but I’ve got a very supportive partner, a very supportive family and ITV let me do it [the broadcasting] from the surgery when I can’t get down to the studio because of my work commitments. I rely on other people to work around me.”
How Families Are Made by Dr Amir Khan is published by Red Shed on February 1, priced £9.99.