Queen's Birthday Honours: Covid-19 intensive care consultant appointed OBE

Alison Pittard said there was a "real sense of comradeship" within the teams of intensive care doctors dealing with Covid-19 patients

A doctor who helped to lead the national intensive care response to Covid-19 has been appointed OBE for services to critical care.

Alison Pittard was tasked with ensuring critical care was as streamlined as possible across NHS hospitals.

A foot injury meant much of her work was done from home, with "18-hour days" in the early stages of the first wave.

Dr Pittard said she was "shocked and completely overwhelmed" by the honour.

Other people from Yorkshire to be recognised in the delayed Queen's Birthday Honours list include a bus driver who kept people smiling in lockdown and a charity organiser from Doncaster.

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Dr Pittard, from Collingham in West Yorkshire, has been a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine in Leeds since 1997.

The 55-year-old, who was elected as dean of The Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine in 2019, helped teams across the UK adapt to new methods of treatment as the crisis unfolded.

She said: "To have intensive care medicine and the NHS recognised is just amazing.

"The award represents all of those people who were trained rapidly and were redeployed to help us manage patients."

Samantha Siddall (front centre), pictured with Edlington Community Organisation volunteers, has been a part of the charity since she was 14

Samantha Siddall, 32, has been appointed MBE for her work with Edlington Community Organisation (ECO) in Doncaster, a community charity she has been involved in for more than half of her life.

Since the beginning of lockdown, Miss Siddall and ECO's team of volunteers have supported at least 4,000 people in the city with food parcels, care packages and check-in services.

She described her team, which has distributed more than £100,000 of donations, as a "community hub and one big family".

"It's a really sad and difficult time, so we just try to help people lift that pressure and tell them everything's going to be alright," she said.

When asked what ECO had meant to isolated people in the city, she said: "They've said that basically we've saved their lives, if it wasn't for us they wouldn't be here today."

Paul Billam dressed as Spiderman and other TV and film characters to spread a web of happiness among children stuck at home during lockdown

Paul Billam, a 59-year-old bus driver in Barnsley, has been awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for services to transport and the community during Covid-19.

While driving the 218 service between Rotherham and Barnsley, he checked on regular passengers as he passed their gates each day by asking for a "thumbs up or down".

"After that I'd go and visit them, try to cheer them up as much as I can and just have a chat with them," he said.

He also dressed up as TV and film characters including Spiderman, the Mask and Zippy from Rainbow to cheer up children stuck at home during lockdown.

He said: "The smiles on their faces were priceless, you could have put a thousand pounds in front of me and say 'that's yours' or have the sight of three or four kids with smiles on their faces, and I'd pick the smiles."

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