“I was seeing COVID-19 patients all day, with no PPE. We were lambs to the slaughter”
Dr Mohammed Abbas Khaki, NHS doctor and international aid worker
Working on the front line has been incredibly gruelling. At one point, I worked 28 days straight, because
I had to cover for colleagues who were shielding or sick. Those early days were chaotic; the people around you were petrified. I’m a minority ethnic doctor and all we were hearing was that minority ethnic males were going to die. I had no PPE, and I was seeing patients with COVID-19 all day. I was one of the first doctors to be a whistleblower on the fact that we had no PPE. We were lambs to the slaughter.
Then there’s the emotional impact. We had to tell grieving families that they couldn’t spend time with their loved ones. We had to see people at their sickest, gasping for breath. We had nowhere to go, no way to de-stress. You can’t even go home to see your loved ones: you’re a risk.
I lost people who were important to me: one of my mentors, as well as someone I worked with at medical school. I was in tears, and
I had no one I could speak to. So, I had to call the doctors who knew them. They were the only people I could grieve with.
I’ve worked in Calais and Lesvos with refugees, and
I’ve worked in Iraq, where we were shot at by Isis.
This past year, I’ve had to draw on every bit of those experiences, and still I’ve felt burned out to pieces.
There is a lot of dark humour among medics. It’s how we cope. A lot of us will put on a brave face, but what we’ve seen and the stress we’ve been under has traumatised us in a way that is etched in our minds.
I think that every worker should have an enforced health assessment: physical, mental, emotional. We need to be proactive, not reactive. We should be reaching out and saying: “We don’t care whether you think you have a mental health problem.
We’ll treat you like you do, unless proven otherwise.”