Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan today told of the heartbreaking moment she helped a dying woman’s children see her on an iPad during the pandemic.
In an emotional interview, the MP for Tooting described working at the Royal London Hospital as part of the family liaison team during the second wave.
It was a time when families were not allowed to visit the bedsides of loved ones, so NHS staff would arrange zoom calls or final visits if they were dying.
Dr Allin-Khan said the intensive care wards were “overflowing” with patients and described it as something out of a “bad movie”.
She told GB News’ Gloria De Piero: “It affected me hugely. There’s one call that I’ll never ever forget as long as I live.
“I took the iPad to a lady who was in her late 20s and she was pregnant and she had to have her baby by emergency caesarean on the intensive care unit.
“She was unconscious, her baby was in the neonatal intensive care unit, and on this call these three little faces popped up and she had three kids at home who were under 6, and their dad.
“I’m there in full PPE looking like an alien to them, then I’m saying hello to them on the iPad and I said ‘I’m just going to turn the iPad so you can see your mummy’.
“They were having this discussion amongst themselves about ‘how can we help Mummy wake up?’ and then they had this discussion that if they all shouted together, maybe Mummy would hear them.
“They just basically in unison, just shouted ‘Mummy, Mummy wake up! You’ve been asleep too long. We miss you.’
“They said ‘Dr, do you think she can hear us?’ I just said ‘oh she can’t just hear you she can feel you, she can feel your love coming through the iPad’.
“They were like ‘Do you think she’ll wake up soon? Do you think that helped?’
“What are you supposed to say at that time? What are you supposed to do? You know, you’ve got these three hopeful little faces the same age as your children.”
An emotional Allin-Khan added: “She was dying. She was dying, and it was heartbreaking. And that’s just one story...”
She has previously described how she struggled to get out of bed at the height of the pandemic after seeing dozens of Covid patients dying in hospitals.
During the interview, the shadow minister for mental health also described her upbringing, becoming a doctor and her love of singing.