Dr Rachel Clarke on Covid-19: “Everybody who dies is precious and loved”

Palliative care doctor and author Rachel Clarke has released her latest book: Breathtaking – Inside the NHS in a time of pandemic, detailing her experiences of working on the frontline during the first wave of Covid-19.

In a video interview for Dying Matters, she explained that she wrote Breathtaking during bouts of insomnia, initially as a form of therapy before realising she wanted to tell the stories of the people she was caring for, as well as describe the precarious working conditions NHS staff found themselves in.  

“I thought it was really important to try and show people what was happening because although everything was so momentous and difficult with PPE and with visitors not being allowed, some things were the same” Clarke explained. “We were still, as NHS staff, doctors and nurses, doing everything in our power to make sure really vulnerable patients at the end of life were still cared for, and still loved despite everything.”

A hundred thousand grieving families

Like her previous book Dear Life, Breathtaking contains stirring patient stories interwoven with Clarke’s observations, this time on the unfolding pandemic, from her feelings when hearing about the first cases in Wuhan, to criticising the Government’s response and the language used to describe efforts to contain the virus.  

“Today, on the day that you and I are talking, we've just had the news that over 100,000 people in total have now died in Britain of Covid” she said. “That just literally makes me want to cry. It's 100,000 bereaved families, 100,000 grieving families.

“Everybody who dies is somebody's mother, father, sister, or brother. To appreciate the enormity of what we're living through, we need to try and hold in our heads the fact that these are human beings, they are loved human beings. They're so precious, they're so valuable and that was one of my driving motives behind wanting to write the book, I wanted to help people feel this, even though it's hard and we want to flinch away from it. This is not about numbers, this is about human beings.”

Hope for the future

The book was written in the first four months of 2020, and while Clarke says it’s “staggering” that we are currently in a severe second wave of the virus, she is optimistic for the future now that there is a vaccine. “I am literally ecstatic that we now have not one but two highly safe and highly effective vaccines against Covid licensed in this country” she said.

“So long as we keep on with basic social distancing measures alongside the vaccination programme, I feel so optimistic. I feel as though maybe in summer 2021 we might have something of our old lives back.