Daily: “This is battlefield medicine” – Frontline COVID Doctor Rachel Clarke

How does it feel to work in the thick of the pandemic and spend time with patients you know will die? Rachel Clarke is a doctor in Oxfordshire who works in palliative care and her new book is Breathtaking: Inside The NHS In A Time Of Pandemic. She talks to Ros Taylor about the incredible personal stress of frontline medicine in the pandemic, the price Britain has paid for Boris Johnson’s “unforgivable” refusal to take the hard decisions, the death threats she’s had for telling the truth about COVID, and why we’re still so determined to look away from Britain’s appalling death toll from Coronavirus.

• “I feel murderous with rage and blind with fury when I hear the Prime Minister trot out his glib claims of success.”
• “I never in a million years thought we’d ever let things get as bad as 2020 again. Yet now we’re in worse conditions than that first peak.”
• “Boris Johnson knows he promised to protect the NHS and he has manifestly failed.”
• “The cruelest aspect of this pandemic is that all the ways we show our love are the ways that COVID spreads.”
• ““The unforgivable thing is not learning from your mistakes, and in Britain we’ve had a litany of mistakes”
• “If our Prime Minister wasn’t being given the science, or worse decided to juggle it for his own political imperatives, then that’s inexcusable”

Presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers Jacob Archbold and Jelena Sofronijevic. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production

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