Season 1
Margaret Duku: Reflections on COVID-19 and the Human Cost
Research nurse Margaret Duku joins host Ashley Pascual to revisit the COVID-19 frontline and the human cost that statistics rarely capture. Redeployed to a main COVID ward as the first lockdown hit, Margaret describes losing more patients in a matter of weeks than across her entire prior career, the daily churn of ever-changing PPE protocols, and the absence of any real support for staff processing grief at that scale. She reflects candidly on being pregnant through 2020 and giving birth in 2021, navigating backlogs and visitor restrictions as a patient inside the very system she served - and on the patients who died alone, without their families beside them. An unflinching account of care, resilience, and what the pandemic exposed about how prepared our institutions really were.
Activist, historian and champion of racial justice Patrick Vernon OBE joins the People, Policy, Power podcast to reflect on a lifetime of advocacy. From growing up in Wolverhampton under Enoch Powell's shadow to the viral 2018 petition that forced the government to confront the Windrush scandal, Vernon traces how individual pain becomes collective power. He speaks candidly about COVID-19's disproportionate toll on Black communities, the Majonzi Fund he helped launch, and why the same battles endure decades on.