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Credit
Yousef Eltuhamy's film - Final edited version. In copyright. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Yousef Eltuhamy, Junior Doctor - Emergency Medicine at Newham University Hospital, filmed in artist's studio in September 2020.
During the first COVID‑19 wave, DR. Yousef Eltuhamy was an FY1 doctor at Newham Hospital. He began in liaison psychiatry but was redeployed to A&E, where he spent most of the first wave.
He worried about COVID early on, following reports from China and global health updates. Dr. Eltuhamy felt the UK wasted precious time preparing, delaying PPE purchasing, ventilator planning, and meaningful public health action, and entered the pandemic unready. As the first wave progressed, patient numbers in A&E suddenly dropped. This created a deep sense of moral injury: many people were suffering and dying at home, not because hospitals lacked capacity, but because government messaging like “Stay Home" and "Protect the NHS” were misleading and made people stay at home. Dr. Eltuhamy finds it distressing to know patients needed help but were not seeking it. Understanding that public messaging was failing, he and his colleagues created multilingual health videos, first about hand‑washing, later encouraging people to attend hospital safely. He felt this was work the government should have done from the start.
Dr. Eltuhamy talks about the deep health inequalities revealed by COVID. He emphasises that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and people of colour died at disproportionately high rates, pointing to longstanding mistrust in healthcare and historical injustices. He believes meaningful change requires listening to communities and increasing diversity in NHS leadership.
Keywords: Accident and Emergency (A&E), Mental Health Services, Health inequalities, Moral injury, Covid messaging