Sudan: NHS doctors caught in war zone feel “betrayed” by UK’s response

A Sudan born hospital doctor at North Middlesex University Hospital, who is stranded in her warring home nation after being denied access to UK government evacuation flights, has told The BMJ that she is “shocked” by the discrimination faced by NHS doctors who “put their lives in danger saving British lives during the pandemic.”

Speaking from Madani, where she and her family fled from Khartoum after gunfire broke out in the capital on 24 April, Einas Mohamed said that the UK government’s response to the plight of NHS doctors trapped in Sudan had been “patronising” and “fudged.”

“They have now ‘kindly’ included doctors on the evacuation list,” Mohamed said of the government’s 30 April extension of evacuation rights to Sudanese doctors working in the UK on biometric residence permits (BRPs).

She added, “However, we could not re-enter the war zone to [reach] Wadi Seidna,” the air base where evacuation flights were initially departing from. “And there is no clear messaging on further evacuations from Port Sudan, so we cannot risk travelling the 15 hours through gunfire. There is a UK ‘support’ team operating at a hotel in Port Sudan, but they don’t seem to know anything.”

Mohamed is one of 74 British visa holding NHS doctors who were trapped in Sudan in mid-April as fighting broke out between the two main factions of the military regime that jointly staged a coup in October 2021 to overthrow the civilian …