The impact of Covid on the BAME anaesthesia community

A lot of talk about black and ethnic minority healthcare workers being more predisposed to COVID-19 and long COVID. From a national perspective, have you seen that at all in the anaesthesia community? We have not seen that specifically in the anaesthesia community. Now, the speciality of anaesthesia in the United Kingdom is proud to be a very diverse speciality. have quite high proportions of BAME doctors who contribute to the very hard work of anaesthesia in the United Kingdom and we have not become aware of any excess of COVID-19 in these patients. However, that does not reflect the population as a whole and I'm aware, as I'm sure you are, of talk and in fact evidence of an excess incidence of COVID-19 and not just the excess incidence but the more severe complications before greater morbidity and greater mortality of COVID-19 in the BAMB community. Now of course there are confounding issues that we know also that general health status affects your response to COVID-19. We know that social deprivation affects your response to COVID-19 and there may be overlaps between some BAMB communities and socially poor areas. We We know that, for instance, hypertension, which can have an excess incidence in some Asian groupings, diabetes, likewise, can have an excess incidence in some BME groups. It's a very complex issue, but what we cannot get away from is that we must look very closely at our BAME colleagues, we must make sure that they are properly assessed by Occupational Health, that they take precautions to protect themselves as much as possible from COVID infection and that if there are any opportunities to make lifestyle changes to minimize the risk of serious complications you should take this very seriously.