I’m a doctor with Long Covid – this is why I’m suing the NHS
Nathalie MacDermott is a paediatric infectious diseases doctor and clinical lecturer at King’s College London.
While working on a Covid ward at Great Ormond Street in May 2020, she contracted Covid, leading to a spinal injury that impairs her ability to work until this day.
She is part of Long Covid Doctors for Action, an advocacy group that is filing a class action lawsuit with the NHS for not adequately protecting healthcare workers from the risks of infection.
Here, she explains to i why she’s part of the movement to sue the NHS.
While working on a Covid ward at Great Ormond Street in May 2020, she contracted Covid, leading to a spinal injury that impairs her ability to work until this day.
She is part of Long Covid Doctors for Action, an advocacy group that is filing a class action lawsuit with the NHS for not adequately protecting healthcare workers from the risks of infection.
Here, she explains to i why she’s part of the movement to sue the NHS.
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00:00 For me this isn't about money, it's not about me obtaining money, it's about holding people
00:06 accountable and ensuring that we don't make the same mistakes again in the future. So I do mixed
00:13 research and clinical work and in March of 2020 I went to work at Great Ormond Street
00:18 during the Covid pandemic, initially looking after children with infectious diseases and
00:24 immunological conditions and then working on a Covid ward for children who had multi-system
00:32 inflammatory syndrome or also symptoms of Covid. And so we were just given surgical face masks and
00:39 small aprons that cover just your torso and a pair of gloves. I continued to raise my concerns
00:47 and challenged this until I got Covid again at the end of May 2020 and during that episode after
00:55 my initial acute Covid symptoms had settled, I noticed I was still getting a lot of pain in my
01:01 feet and had nerve pain in my feet and then went on to, things sort of progressed then thereafter and
01:06 I had limitations in my ability to walk and also my bladder and my bowel were affected.
01:13 Things haven't changed in the last three and a half years. Yeah, it's thought that Covid has
01:19 somehow damaged my spinal cord but it's not entirely clear how or what exactly has happened.
01:24 It's very limiting for me. Yes, I'm able to work and things nowadays when many of my colleagues
01:32 aren't but I largely work from home and I do research. Doing a full-time clinical job is
01:39 physically too demanding for me. I need to be much more mobile to do it. I did have a mobility
01:46 scooter to help me get around wards and do ward rounds but even that was quite exhausting.
01:50 So it's, I can't walk very far anymore. When I do walk it's with crutches. To go significant
01:57 distances I have a mobility scooter. You know, even just going up a flight of stairs some days,
02:02 that's a real challenge. My passion has always been doing disaster and epidemic response with a
02:11 non-governmental organisation and obviously that's quite difficult to send a doctor who's disabled
02:17 out to a war zone or an epidemic situation where their facilities might not be as good and where
02:26 there might be a civil unrest and just infrastructure challenges. For me this isn't
02:33 about money. It's not about me obtaining money. It's about holding people accountable and ensuring
02:41 that we don't make the same mistakes again in the future. For some of my colleagues though who have
02:47 lost their livelihoods and their jobs and have been unable to work for many years and are now
02:52 unemployed and having to apply for universal credit and other benefits, some of them are using
03:00 food banks, then I think a payout for them is a) justified and b) of significant benefit.
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