Coronavirus in UK kills Hong Kong-born nurse, highlights NHS need for migrant doctors, other health care workers
- Hong Kong-born Alice Kit Tak Ong, who died this week from coronavirus, had worked for the NHS for 44 years
- At least 20 doctors and nurses have died from Covid-19 so far in the UK: more than half of them were either not born in Britain, or were children of migrants
The high proportion of doctors and nurses from parts of the former British Empire who have died fighting the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the vital role of immigrants in the UK’s National Health Service.
It has also shown the extent to which health care in the UK is reliant on migrants from all over the world, from low-paid Nigerian hospital cleaners to highly-paid EU medical consultants.
Hong Kong-born Alice Kit Tak Ong, who died this week aged 70 from coronavirus, had worked for the NHS for 44 years. Her family believe she caught Covid-19 from a patient in one of the two doctor’s surgeries where she worked in the north-west London borough of Brent. She was not given any protective clothing to wear.
Ong came to the UK in the early 1970s to study nursing and joined the health service after qualifying. She worked first as a midwife, then as a diabetic specialist nurse. For the last 20 years she had being doing both in community GP surgeries.
“My mother came here from Hong Kong to work for the NHS because she believed it was the best in the world,” her daughter Melissa Ong said, according to Sky News.
Dr Amrit Lamba, a GP at the medical centre in northwest London where Alice Kit Tak Ong worked, said she had “talked of retirement, but nursing and medicine was a real passion for her and she would never let it go”.
