“It’s important that people recognise the influence of immigrants, not just in the NHS,” said Amal El-Hawrani, the youngest sibling of ear, nose and throat (ENT) consultant Amged, who died after contracting coronavirus.
Amged, 55, was the first frontline hospital doctor with Covid-19 to die and one of 12 medics so far to have lost their lives.
Strikingly, all have been black and minority ethnic, raising debate about the reasons they are disproportionately dying – 44% of NHS medical staff are BAME – but also highlighting their contribution.
El-Hawrani said he believed the sense of community service drove many BAME people to go into medicine. While his family is immensely proud of his brother, he believes Amged would have cringed “in a good way” at the recognition he is getting.
But he says things were not always easy in the NHS for Amged, who worked at Queen’s hospital in Burton, Staffordshire.
“He was never someone who dwells on negative aspects,” he recalled. “But I do know he wanted to be an orthopaedic surgeon and felt the opportunity was closed to him because of racial prejudices. It [ENT] was just something he ended up doing – he made the best of the cards that were dealt to him …
“In war, you have people who are cannon fodder. There’s definitely an element of that here – BAME doctors don’t always get the prestigious cushy roles.”
His biggest hope is that coronavirus leads to a re-evaluation of not just the immigrant contribution but of others in key jobs.
“You have all these influencers on Instagram, whereas you’ve got doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers [not getting recognition],” he said. “People need to recognise what roles are important and give them the recognition they deserve.”
As for his brother, he says, he will remember him as someone “who always made you feel happy, a warm person, when he came to visit you it felt like a treat”.
The same sense of an immigrant doctor motivated to help the community shines through in the description of Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a consultant urologist at Homerton hospital in Hackney, east London, by his 18-year-old son Intisar Chowdhury.
“He never took time off, he dedicated his entire life to helping others, making a difference and saving lives,” the teenager said.
He recalled how every day after work his father, who was 53, would go to see his own mother – Intisar’s grandmother – who is in a care home with dementia, to talk to her and feed her dinner, no matter how busy his day had been.
Intisar said his father came from “very humble beginnings” as one of 11 siblings in a village in Bangladesh and had “really broken boundaries”.
His parents came to the UK in 2001, where he said both, “like every single immigrant”, experienced racism.
“My father always talks about the hardship he faced,” he said. “He never wanted me and my sister to face those hardships. He wanted us to achieve our full potential without facing those same hardships.”
He said his father treated everyone he met like a member of his family, and his concern for his colleagues was evidenced by the fact that shortly before he died he raised concerns about the shortage of personal protective equipment in hospitals. “He died so we can live,” he said.
He believes his father’s death after spending 15 days in Queen’s hospital, Romford, pushed the government into acting on PPE and now it may have helped prompt them to launch an inquiry into the disproportionate number of BAME deaths too.
It is an inquiry that both El-Hawrani and Chowdhury support, although the latter said: “If it does come to show that [there is a correlation with ethnicity], I don’t know how I am going to process that.”
