Our proud, multicultural city is reaching out to touch the lives of others

Jo O’Brien, 52, is a senior sister at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, Greater Manchester.

She worked through the night to treat victims of the Manchester Arena atrocity and has been inspired by the courage and attitude of colleagues, patients and her community.

As Jo explains to Claire Donnelly, the city’s positive response has been a force for good, bringing people together, even in the darkest of times.

The night of the Manchester attack was the most challenging of my life but the most inspiring too. Like a lot of people, I’ve chosen to make sense of what happened by finding the positives, celebrating the love, kindness and resilience I saw and highlighting the unity that is still there.

Manchester is a proud, multicultural city. And this is our strength. We don’t have a Muslim community or a non-Muslim community. We just have a community.

If we had a photograph of the staff working that night you’d see people of all different backgrounds but part of one team. People from four faiths, people with no faith, people with different skin colours, people born in the UK, people who have come to the UK, all rushing in to hospital to do what they do every day – help others.

We arrived in the hours after the attack, most of us after working the day before, and worked through the night. We were dealing with major trauma, working in three theatres and treating horrific injuries – ones I’d never seen before.

I’ve been doing this job for 29 years and it was the worst situation I’d dealt with but we just got on with it. Next day I had to force people to go off shift because they wanted to stay with their patients.

One doctor came in after being caught in the attack. He was in the foyer with his daughters but didn’t say anything until 6am

after working all night. That’s the calibre of people in the NHS. The love, professionalism and dedication are always there but that week they really shone through.

And the patients have been so inspiring. The first lady I helped had horrible injuries. She could have so easily been consumed with hatred but was smiling at staff. She thanked the nurse who’d been with her and thanked me. It was awesome because it was all about making a human connection. And that is what we have to carry on doing.

I walk my dog and after the attack everyone I saw said, ‘Good morning’. We were starting to reach out to each other, needing to know we were part of something. Because we are.