Apothecary 2020

Faculty of Conflict and Catastrophe
Medicine Student Essay Prize 2020
We are very pleased to announce a new Essay Prize
which will be awarded to one of our current students of
the Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine Course and will be
published in the Apothecary Journal annually.
This year we asked students to submit an essay which
would demonstrate the impact of the Pandemic on
healthcare workers. The Apothecary Editorial Committee
were impressed with the essays submitted and there was
a healthy discussion during the adjudication. The Essay
Prize has been awarded to Safia Akhtar for her very
heartfelt piece on her experiences during the pandemic.
The reason that this Essay was chosen is that it documents
some of the most striking aspects of the UK’s healthcare
response to COVID19; it mentions how GP Practices were
assessing patients in their car parks, Nightingale
Hospitals as well as the realities faced by those that
worked in hospitals such as the isolation faced by those
dying without their relatives by their side, the physical
consequences of proning patients and the various ways
that the medical profession desperately try to maximise
oxygenation when this new virus consumed the lungs of
those afflicted. It also records the fact that so many
seemed to be ethnic middle aged men who were some of
the sickest in hospital which will, no doubt, be the subject
of research in the future. It increases awareness on the
moral injury faced by those making the difficult decisions
when faced with a brand new virus and limited resource.
On a happier, note it reveals how far we have come over
the last nine months and we now have very real advances
that have changed the management of these patients.
We believe that future Apothecaries reading this piece
will get a good flavour of the pandemic we faced in 2020
in comparison to historical pandemics, we hope you agree.
Dr Christina Dale MBBS FRCEM
President, Faculty of Conflict & Catastrophe Medicine
“I’LL TAKE SOME TIME”. An answer I found myself
repeatedly giving to questions from patients, colleagues
and friends. Rather a “longitudinal” response
accounting for an extended period of time, as I had just
completed a Masters in Tropical Medicine studying
epidemiology. Months earlier whilst completing field
research, I had been offered roadside pangolins and
bushmeat on my daily commute in central Cameroon,
and here we had a novel zoonotic disease on my
doorstep. I felt obliged to participate in the pandemic
response.
There was shrill excitement amongst peers in the
global community. We had studied for such an event,
that would require core public health principles to be
applied on an international level. The amount of
unrefined information being shared was remarkable.
Opinions shouted over each other in a quest for
attention, paralleled by the media’s attempt to sustain
noise. Enough to give one a headache, which it did, so I
muted most sources.
In contrast, my patients in primary care were
desperate for information. The hinderance in giving it
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