BAME communities in the Midlands tell their story in their own words of COVID-19.

Picture inset of hospital equipment taken by participant who works at an NHS Hospital (© permission obtained from participants (anonymous)  

(Anonymous NHS worker) - Interviewed by Anand Chhabra

I have recently arrived to the UK February 2020 to the UK. I chose to come to the UK as I wanted to progress and extend my professional experience in other countries. I wanted to develop my professional skills as a nurse and at the same time using my vocation to assist people and help serve others.

After passing my English exams and my professional exams in nursing, after getting through these exams, I was able to be in the process of registering to work in the UK. I started looking into job vacancies in the UK via a certain website in Africa. There were various opportunities to work in a hospital and I chose to apply to work in a hospital in the Midlands. Soon after my application I was given the job. I started my training at the NHS in February as soon as I arrived, so I arrived basically right before the lockdown started. 

Along with this, two weeks into completing my training as a nurse I had to start work on the wards straightaway in the hospital because of the spread of COVID-19. I started my induction and then the training we completed just two weeks out of six weeks before we were sent to help out on the ward straight away.

Therefore during the first lockdown I was working with patients who had tested positive and it was very scary especially because at that moment everything was very new about this disease. Not having enough experience of working in the UK, not even been able to settle into life in a new country and when you are away from family in the middle of the lockdown and then you find yourself in the middle of a pandemic. I felt I shouldn't be working with patients straight away, so this situation was very frightening for me.

I am glad to say I had a very supportive manager at the ward that I was assigned to and the manager was able to help me. He was able to understand where I was coming from given my situation as newly arrived in the country. So my working environment I have to say was very friendly and nobody was thinking about themselves on my ward in terms of what our race and skin colour they were, whether white or black. The fact we simply faced and saw at first hand the suffering under this pandemic and so as dedicated staff we just focused on being united because of the situation. That's something that gave me the strength to continue and to overcome my initial fears.

Literally, I was sent work on a ward straight after my training was cut short. The ward had been set up because of the pandemic and then it was shut down again as things developed and other wards opened up. All trainees were asked to work in this temporary ward and we found ourselves working with other nurses of colour who mostly had arrived from overseas like me.

So the majority of the nurses who worked on the ward that I was working with, most or majority are all black there were a few white nurses but the most of us were black and from overseas. 

My initial fears about contracting the COVID disease stemmed from the fact when you start to wear PPE ( Personal Protection Equipment) sometimes I began to doubt if I was putting it on correctly because I'm not experienced nor used to putting this on, I haven’t had yet any training with PPE for such an experience.  Sometimes you were using the PPE and you were thinking ‘did I put this on correctly?’ Or should I have done this? Why did I do this compared to what I felt I needed to do? And so I was thinking and fearing that maybe I've contacted COVID-19 because I haven't been able to use the PPE correctly in the way I think I should have done. Everything was new and I felt under the pressure, taking care of sick patients affected by the disease. So this was the  reason for me feeling afraid. 

The main thing I have come to realise, particularly as I was new to the UK, is what I could learn from other conversations the challenge that black nurses would face. They would try and get to work in comparison to their white counterparts who tended to phone in sick regularly. In my experience the Black & Asian nurses have been very courageous to meet the challenge of Covid-19 pandemic in the hospitals in the Midlands. Given my professional training and my personal experience I worked with a clear conscience that I am serving the public in the best way I could.  

I can't say particularly that the patients on my ward that I was dealing with that there were more Black or Asian patients more than others on the ward when we reference the outbreak and the disproportionate effect of the disease on POC’s (People of Colour) fairly early on in the pandemic early this year March/April 2020.

To provide context the particular ward I worked on it was quickly opened and it was it was a small ward. It was quickly opened initially at the onset of the disease’s arrival to the UK as the staff didn't think that it was going to spread as fast as it did and the ward was really full and so they were looking to move patients because of circumstances and arrangements to the ward as the disease spread. 

Eventually and of course I heard the news from colleagues that the disease was affecting the Black and Asian community disproportionally and at that time it wasn’t covered on the news. I began to hear this later in the middle of everything I was doing. However upon hearing the news and being from Africa I was able to be quite calm because I'm not having any symptoms or and even though I was doing ‘banks’ (which means extra shifts). The banks I found myself doing quite comfortably and I wasn't getting any symptoms or catching anything, and I was taking all the precautions with PPE and I just had confidence to continue in the way I wanted to work.  

I could hear from my colleagues that the effects  of the disease on the BIPOC community was definitely true and so heard that directly from my colleagues at the hospital but that didn't disturb me personally because I've already been working in the ward and I was ok, that gave me the confidence to continue to work with extra shifts  and so I carried on serving the patients in the best way I could with the PPE I had.

 But my fear is now that working as a nurse dealing with the disease in the frontline that my wife and my children who have recently arrived to settle with me here in the Midlands. To be honest my fears have been reignited a little as I just want them to be safe and I want to be able to sleep with my family in the safe knowledge that they are ok. So my situation is different as I am not just thinking about taking care of myself but my wife and children and that's  made me take extra care around my behaviours and routine as a nurse for their sake. 

When my family were in Africa the spread of COVID-19 there wasn't as bad as the situation was in Europe. I personally think the reasons it's affected people in the UK more than in my home country in Africa  because it could be doing something with the climate because in Africa the climate is quite a bit warmer and obviously viruses survive longer in cold weather so I think you can see that by the fact that there's a spike again second spike which is greater than the first back in February.

The lockdown that my children experience negatively here that they weren’t experiencing in Africa was they couldn't go to school, the kids they want to learn in school, but they were stuck at home in the last 2-weeks. They went back and are in lockdown again. They keep asking questions as to when they will be able to go back, sometimes they don't grasp that they need to be safe before they able to go back to school. So this is one way my family has to take more precautions and accepting the restrictions and the lockdown rules here, because we realise that we're not in Africa which has a hotter climate as we are now living in a cooler one.

I think the vaccine will definitely help in the future and it looks like at the moment it's a disease we need to live with and have got to be very careful and cautious about and maybe it's going to stay for some time. Sometimes people get used to a new disease. I think in my professional experience a vaccine will definitely help everybody young, old, the public and the patients and the of course for the NHS.