International Public Speaker & Medical Student
With the fact that you’re not studying a degree grounded in economics, I’d love to know why you decided to study medicine.
I have always had this real drive to help people, and make an impact, which is obviously something every doctor says, but for me, it was more than that. It was the fact that I really love to learn. I really like knowing the root cause – the “why”. As with all of the work I do, I always care the most about the root cause and mechanisms behind what we think is the real picture. Something that really comes into this concept for me, was medicine. I see medicine as a massive puzzle piece: a patient will come to you and they’ll be in pain, but what’s behind that? What’s going on, on a cellular level? What is the blood test telling me? What’s going on structurally in the heart? Medicine is more than just acquiring surface level information, we really have to dig deep to uncover all the layers. And it’s about the uncovering of these layers and addressing the root problem which is what led me to medicine.
While the nature of medicine is to help people, for me it was more the opportunity to better understand, address and advocate for people, and their health, as a whole that drew me to studying the subject. This is the same reason that I do all my advocacy work and the same approach I take to this – it’s more than just identifying a problem – it’s about understanding the wider context and figuring out what’s happening behind the scenes.
There are currently a lot of economic stories about the situation that the NHS finds itself in. And I wonder, as someone who might be looking towards a career or whose peer group is looking towards a career in the NHS, is there anything that particularly worries you about the state of the NHS at the moment?
I think the position I’m in is, once again, a slightly more unique one in that I always say I’m more than just a medical student, and I do a lot of things which are not directly related to clinical medicine. As soon as I started my degree in 2020, we were faced with COVID. I always told myself and my family that I don’t think I’m going to graduate into the same NHS that existed when I joined Medical School. I am going into my fifth year and this is an opinion that has only been strengthened in the last 4 years. I really do not think that the NHS that we were born and raised in, is going to be the same NHS that I’m going to be working in, in 12 months time. I think there is partial anxiety about that because it is natural to be apprehensive about the unknown, but then, equally, that gives so much opportunity to shape new things.
Something really good about how we practice medicine, is that when we see an area we can be more effective in provision, we do audits and QIPS. There’s an untold managerial side to clinical medicine; projects physicians can undertake in order to better each individual ward or unit. It’s somewhat unfortunate but people have had to take on more of these managerial roles to deal with all of the shortcomings in the sector at the moment. While this means that people have had to be a lot more adaptable and a lot more T-shaped, which I always promote, I feel like the direction that the NHS is going in means that it may, in a way, really benefit some people, by getting them more managerial experience, but also simultaneously hinder others and push them away from healthcare.
We’ve currently got a strike going on today [July 1st] and we’ve got consultants who are having to go back and do ECGs, take blood, and other procedural skills – things that they’ve not done for up to 10 years since specialising. In an attempt to see some light in these really uncertain times, it can be nice to go back to doing things from earlier in your career, that you don’t get to do as often, and remember how well-rounded you are, even when specialised. In no way should this be the norm, and while we are coping with it quite well considering how fragile the state of the NHS is at the moment, there needs to be change because this is not sustainable.
I’d like to go back to what you said about this notion of being ‘T shaped’. I’ve never come across this as an idea before. Could you explain what this means and how you might apply it in your life.
If we think about the letter T, as a shape, it stretches out in front of you, and then branches out into a long line. A lot of people, in how they approach life or university, can be quite one dimensional. With medicine as a degree, in my experience I have found this to be particularly true. There is a certain pathway that is drilled into you from before you even enroll: you get the medical degree, you become a doctor, you work as a junior doctor for a few years, you become a registrar, and then finally a consultant. It is a very linear path: you know what you are going to do and you follow the basic idea of a start, a middle and an end.
Whereas, when I think about being T shaped, while you might have a designated central path that you’re on, you have the opportunity to branch away from this path and take lessons learnt from it, onto other endeavors. For myself, I am a medical student, but I also do various modes of advocating for social mobility, policy and governance work as well as understanding intersectionality and the role it has in cultivating better outcomes in these attempts.
My central path is always wanting to understand the cause of “why” something is the case, and using that understanding and expertise to provide an impact on others. As I said, the reason why I do medicine is more than just wanting to be a doctor, but it’s wanting to understand causal relationships, in complex situations.
I would also love to ask about you being a UN Women UK delegate. What is UN Women and, secondly, why did you decide to get involved?
UN Women is the only organisation working toward gender equality at all levels, both in the UK and globally. When you think of the United Nations you might only think that it’s a really large body, but really, there are lots of smaller entities, within the broader organisation, each dedicated to different missions, which make up the whole collective. Part of that collective is the work done within UN Women. In March, they had the 68th session of the CSW (Commission on the Status of Women), an annual conference, in which I was very fortunate to be one of the delegates for UN Women UK. It gave me the opportunity to attend the conference and have conversations with other delegates from around the nation.
I think the main reason I signed up for the conference is, as I say, I’ve always been very, very interested in understanding “why” and your understanding only improves when you are exposed to varied perspectives, in this instance, a plethora of global opinions. I always say that I love learning about people’s lived experiences because the more lived experience you’ve heard and understood, the more educated and the more knowledgeable you will be in order to better influence policy and deliver true change.
In my time as a UN Women UK delegate, I had the opportunity to learn from people in various different career paths from CEOs to students to podcast hosts, people across both the private and public sector. We bonded over the similarity of wanting to advocate for gender equality, but recognised we’re also so individually different: different stages in life; different ages; different jobs; different aspirations. It was so inspiring.
In terms of the next steps after the program, we as delegates will be working on various projects in order to derive some tangible outputs from that conference. One of the things that UN women does really well is taking the issues raised during the CSW sessions, into delegate meetings and applying them to prospective projects, creating briefs for what we will be working up in the lead up to the next CSW session. I’m not too sure that I can talk about them before they actually come out, but I’m excited to be working on them, and making more global impacts!
Having spaces specifically for women like UN Women is obviously very important. Both of us have been to an all-girls school and these can sometimes be an environment which is not the safest space and where there is not a great degree of supportiveness between women. How do you think that we can build environments advocating the ideas of, and policy solutions targeted towards, women which are positive and supportive rather than having these negative, often competitive, elements that can occur particularly in an environment like a secondary school?
I think the main thing whenever we think about this topic is promoting a sense of belonging. Especially in schools and youth organisations, people are of the age where they can sometimes feel like they don’t belong, or that they’ve not yet found their footing.
The main thing is that you need to feel as though you have people to talk to you and who you can relate to. At school, as in any working environment, you need to understand that you’re not necessarily going to have a perfect experience with everyone that is there.
I personally do a lot of work promoting this sense of belonging at my university, and this involves working with senior leadership and with the students themselves. I find that there are two aspects to this work when I think about creating a sense of belonging: first of all we need to promote that sense of belonging and make sure that people feel comfortable and seen. That is not simply posting a picture with people of various ethnicities on a board, for example, but it’s making sure that when people enter a room, they feel as though they deserve to be in that room and that they are respected equally. The second aspect is ensuring there is someone or somewhere that an individual can go if they don’t feel like they belong. This second branch is, in my opinion, particularly pertinent when we think about the secondary school environment. Because, in secondary school, you’re not away from home so the sense of belonging isn’t necessarily as prevalent as when you’re in university. Thankfully, I’m seeing a lot more societies based on personalities, similar to those which you’d find in a university, which help promote that sense of belonging. Schools and sixth forms now have organisations such as Afro Caribbean societies which allow you to connect with people based on an aspect of your identity and personality, which is going to help you find your people.
You talk a lot, particularly on your LinkedIn, about your experiences being a bursary recipient. So I’d really love to know what work you’ve done on that after leaving secondary school and also, more generally, how that experience impacted you.
Just this Saturday, I gave a keynote interview at the bursary ball raising money for the bursary fund of my secondary school. I think the bursary fund is absolutely incredible and I do lots of work raising awareness and fundraising for it. We need to have more conversations about the importance of these funds and, as you say, I’m very open and very honest about having been a bursary recipient. It has completely changed and transformed the type of person I am. A lot of my personal development has stemmed from lessons that I learned going to a school that I would not have been able to access were it not for the provision of bursaries.
I am proud to have been a bursary recipient and I feel like I want to pay forward and help more people access the opportunities that I have had through a bursary. You can’t put a price on an amazing education and I would never want people to feel like they can’t access that just because of their financial circumstances. One of the really brilliant things that my school did is that no one knows you are a bursary recipient until you tell them. Throughout my entire education (7 years) none of my teachers or anybody else knew that I was a bursary recipient. I only started doing all my work for the fund, after I received my A-Levels. I posted on Twitter about how I wished I could tell my younger self on her first day as a bursary student that she’d be going to medical school and pursuing her dream job, and after that, some of my teachers reached out to me and asked me if I’d be interested in talking about my experiences. There was no pressure for the school for their to be a reciprocal relationship as a bursary recipient, which I’m thankful for because I’ve heard some instances from other people in other situations where they have felt a pressure to talk about it, in a positive light, just because they’ve had that financial investment in them.
Is there anyone, either in your personal life or just generally who you’ve seen online who is a particular inspiration to you?
I think one of my main inspirations is definitely my mum. A lot of the work that I do is about listening to people and their experiences and opinions. I’m in a really fortunate position where I can do a lot of policy work, as well as public speaking, so I have had the opportunity to have a larger platform where I can talk about people’s experiences as well as my own. Something that I’ve always strived to do in this work is to take forward the opinions of multiple people, who cannot share the stage with me – opinions and lived experiences I’ve learnt through listening, something that my mum has always done. She’s such an active listener and has always known when to stay silent and learn, or otherwise, take the stage and use her voice to give expertise. While she doesn’t do policy work like myself, I can always see a little reflection of my mum in the work that I do.
Could you give us an explainer of the work that you do regarding intersectionality and why this is so important to you?
I feel as though when we think about policy and changemaking, we can sometimes think with a very narrow mind, or we can assume that there’s a ‘one size fits all’ answer. Sometimes we’re too quick to put a label onto why something might be an issue.
For instance, in healthcare, we might see that a particular minority group is disadvantaged in some sense, or that another group is not as represented in another sense, and then we’ll slap a label on it and call it a day. But the role that I’ve always had, is promoting more accountability and being that person who says, “okay, wait a minute, what do we actually mean by this?”.
So, when we think about intersectionality, we are looking to understand the true reason behind a problem or concern, and accepting the reality that is may be because of complex web of multiple barriers interacting with each other.
Let’s say we see a gap in academic attainment between students who used to receive free school meals, and baseline students. That does not mean that if you get free school meals, you are inherently not going to succeed in university. What that may mean is you might have other commitments that at times, take precedence over your academics. Maybe they had a parallel deadline for a financial scholarship from an external fund they were applying to. Maybe that student has to partially commute in, to support life at home, and so cannot attend last-minute scheduled exam prep sessions.
Intersectionality involves understanding that, while you might see a trend, that may not necessarily be the true answer. You have to dig a little bit deeper.
I always say that intersectionality is the way forward. It’s more than just thinking that most issues involve race, gender and disability, but instead involves looking at what the driving forces behind these issues are. This is the main consistency with everything I do. I try to always look for the driving force and address it. You can’t fix racism. You can’t fix sexism. You can’t fix gender discrimination. But, the perpetuating factors which exacerbate those issues, are things that can be addressed.
That is what I’m always going to try and do with all the work that I do, whether it’s policy, advocacy, public speaking, medicine or even interviews just like this one. I find the opportunity to promote the concepts that we need to, in order to peel back layers to better understand the true picture of what’s going on.