Pregnant Birmingham doctor felt 'duty of care' during pandemic

Perpetual Uke said her twins were doing well and would be starting reception in September

A doctor whose twins were delivered while she was in an induced coma said she had exposed herself to Covid-19 despite being at high-risk because she felt a duty of care to patients.

Birmingham consultant Perpetual Uke's children were delivered by Caesarean section at 26 weeks on 10 April 2020.

She said she was one of many vulnerable NHS staff who did not have "ideal protection" early in the pandemic.

The government has previously defended its record on protective equipment.

However, it also said lessons would be learned, and government procurement and personal protective equipment (PPE) forms one strand of the ongoing Covid Inquiry.

Although the government had stockpiles at the start of the pandemic, hospitals quickly struggled to source more, with three billion pieces of PPE used by the NHS in just the first six months of the crisis.

"I was a high-risk [member of] staff at that stage. I even saw a patient who arrived from abroad and had been exposed in a hotel where there were 100 cases of Covid," Dr Uke said.

"I was just hoping [Covid] wouldn't get near me, but I [had] that duty of care. Even when I felt that I [was] at risk, I [was] still going out to look after my patients."

Dr Uke, who has two older children, struggled to believe the twins were hers when she awoke from her coma

Dr Uke, a rheumatology consultant at Birmingham City Hospital, said working on the wards at the time was a "very very scary" experience and she saw people dying before she contracted the virus herself.

Admitted to a critical care unit, she was placed on a ventilator and put into an induced coma to help her recover.

When she woke, 16 days after the twins had been born, she struggled to believe they were hers.

Despite weighing just 27oz and 30oz at birth, she said her twins were now doing "amazingly well" and would be starting school in September.

In an interview with BBC Radio WM, Dr Uke also paid tribute to ITV's new pandemic drama Breathtaking, based on the memoir by palliative care doctor Dr Rachel Clarke.

She said the show resonated with her own experience of working in as a doctor during the pandemic.

"It confirmed what I know because I experienced the Covid pandemic from both sides of the ward. I saw it as a patient and as a care-giver," she said.

"So it is real. It is really breath-taking and overwhelming when you think about it."

She told the BBC she hoped it would bring more scrutiny to how the pandemic was handled and what NHS staff were "put through" during the pandemic.

Reflecting on her experience during the pandemic, Dr Uke said: "It was an experience we never envisaged, because we were not prepared for it.

"If it happens again in the future, we will be able to deal with it better. That means we need to have a clear post-mortem to see what has happened, what went wrong, and making sure it doesn't happen again."