The selfless heroes who are the heartbeat of Britain's health service

When we asked readers to nominate their unsung champions of the NHS, we were overwhelmed by moving stories about staff from all parts of the health service, not least their sheer courage, compassion and dedication during the pandemic.

Last week, our finalists received their awards from the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, at Downing Street. Here, we tell their inspiring stories, starting with our overall winner. 

Mental health nurse transforming care 

It was following a serious incident, where a young woman with an eating disorder was violently resisting having a nasogastric tube inserted, requiring six staff members to help, that Mebrak Ghebrehiwet became determined to make changes.

So after each shift — and she was working six days a week — this recently qualified mental health nurse went home and spent hour after hour consulting textbooks, reading as much background material as she could into the psychology of eating disorders.

And thanks to her dedication and research, the use of restraint at St Ann’s Eating Disorders Service in London, where she worked, has plummeted, and what she’s done could ultimately help patients in similar units around the country.

For those helping people with eating disorders, forced nasogastric feeding is a particularly stressful part of their job. This is used as an absolute last resort, but without it the patient will die.

These are desperately ill patients, shockingly emaciated but who genuinely believe they are overweight. Some have to be fed in this way daily, for weeks.

Although it is lifesaving, forced nasogastric feeding is deeply traumatising for the patient, and the staff, too, as the patient may need to be held down and restrained with force.

Often those affected have a history of trauma, such as abuse, and this experience can echo that trauma, say psychiatrists.

And the staff, who’ve chosen mental health to support these patients and champion their rights, find themselves in a situation where they’re at risk of traumatising the very people they want to help — so they, too, can need counselling afterwards.

Mebrak, 45, identified small problems that raised stress levels and ultimately led to restraint.

As she explains: ‘The ward runs like clockwork, and the patients rely on routine. They’re anxious already, worrying about how they will cope with the stress of their next meal, and anything small that affects this tight schedule can set off a catastrophic chain of events.’ 

Mebrak worked out simple steps to minimise this kind of anxiety, such as printing menus for the patient to lessen the risk of serving them the wrong meal or different food than they were expecting.

She devised a ‘getting to know you’ form — a simple patient questionnaire on admission, giving personal likes and dislikes, after noticing that patients can ‘take a long time to open up’.

So a simple form that states ‘what TV they like to watch, the music they enjoy, and the things they know can calm them down, gives staff an at-a-glance chance to understand more about the person they are helping.

‘If that patient becomes agitated, then the staff can use something from the form to help calm them.’

Another step involved providing staff with a copy of the shift allocation, so that they’re aware of who else is working and can therefore organise tasks and manage their time more efficiently — in turn, freeing them to talk to anxious patients.

These steps ‘sparked a real cultural change and made a massive difference on our wards’, says Dr Yoav Jacob, a consultant psychiatrist at St Ann’s, who nominated Mebrak for a Daily Mail Health Hero Award.

‘Mebrak realised that while restraints had to happen, it didn’t have to be adversarial,’ he says. ‘Now, we have patients who are restrained to be fed, but who will sit and watch a film with a nurse straight afterwards.’

As well as this achievement, Mebrak’s compassion has been singled out for praise by many patients and their families.

One had spent more than six years mostly on the ward, yet incredibly has now been discharged, with her parents saying that Mebrak’s kindness, even when their daughter had to be restrained, stood out.

Spending her own money on buying books according to patients’ particular interests is just another example of Mebrak’s kindness — as is buying, on her day off, a toy rabbit for a highly distressed patient. Dr Jacob says: ‘She goes above and beyond her duties in a really tough environment.’

During the pandemic, Mebrak has worked on her days off, helping keep the unit open while others across the UK were forced to close because of staff sickness or redeployment.

But as Mebrak explains: ‘Coronavirus meant the patients couldn’t have visitors, which was really upsetting. We only had critical patients on the ward, and I felt lucky that with all the uncertainty and fear circulating, I was able to keep working and feel useful.’ And when Mebrak wasn’t at work, she’d be helping in many other ways — donning PPE in the evening to take blood samples from a housebound neighbour, for instance, delivering it to the hospital the next day, and shopping for those who couldn’t.

‘The work that modest people like Mebrak, who never sought a promotion, do on the frontline, especially this past year, deserves recognition,’ Dr Jacob says.

That work has now indeed been recognised — with Mebrak Ghebrehiwet being announced as the overall winner at this year’s Daily Mail Health Hero Awards.

After the ceremony at Downing Street last Wednesday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that as well as being ‘incredibly proud of every single worker in the NHS’, he was also delighted to ‘personally applaud those special people among us who have gone above and beyond for the NHS’.

On receiving the award, Mebrak said she was ‘absolutely gobsmacked and overwhelmed’ to win the top prize, and hoped it would shine a spotlight on the efforts of staff working in mental health wards.

Mebrak says her own struggles as a teenager helped her understand patients. She arrived in the UK from Eritrea at age 14, not speaking any English. ‘I felt extremely alone,’ she says, ‘and I’m aware of what it’s like to think nobody understands you.

‘I was lucky because I had the support of my brothers and sisters; but I had friends with mental health problems — and as I witnessed their struggles, I decided I wanted to be a psychotherapist.’

At 17, Mebrak was at university studying psychology but became pregnant. ‘I tried desperately to study but it was too hard while also raising a child alone,’ she says.

So she worked instead as a hospital administrator for 17 years while raising her son, Akeem, now 27, before retraining as a nurse and qualifying in 2017.

Mebrak, who lives in North London, explains what drew her to working in mental health: ‘As a student nurse, I did a placement on the eating disorders ward, and as the patients started to tell me about their struggles, it really resonated with me.

‘Mental health felt like a calling. There was no question that I would do anything else.’ 

Brain surgeon with a caring touch 

Tim Lawrence is a consultant paediatric neurosurgeon at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust.

Even on Christmas Day, or at 3am after a 16-hour operation, Tim will be answering emails and calls from his patients and their families. 

As Lily Hawkins, 17, diagnosed with a brain tumour ten years ago, explains: ‘Nothing is ever too much trouble for him.

‘I’ve had ten operations over the past three years and Tim makes everything easier to cope with; he makes me feel so safe. He even recently helped me with my science homework and made sure I didn’t have too much hair shaved for an operation because I wanted to look good back at school.

‘It seems like a little thing, but he really considers how I feel; far beyond any other doctor I’ve met.’

Tim, 43, treats some of the most vulnerable patients — children with serious brain conditions.

He says: ‘This isn’t a job that has time boundaries. Children are in pain, parents are terrified and managing the psychological side by answering their questions is vital, so when the phone goes in the middle of the night, I answer.’

Tim was inspired by the example of his father, ‘an old-fashioned GP’. He explains: ‘In the street, people would come up to thank him, and I grew up seeing the impact his work had on the lives of others.’

Lily’s mother Lorraine, an NHS midwife, says she’s never seen such compassion.

‘For instance, Lily was so terrified of needles she couldn’t even have an MRI without a general anaesthetic; Tim worked with a psychologist and play specialists so she no longer needs this.’

Tim continued with his surgery during the pandemic but he also helped with Covid patients in intensive care.

Beyond his clinical skill, Tim’s research on using MRI for patients with traumatic brain injuries could help improve diagnosis and treatment. He’s also involved with looking at pushing changes to regulations around window design to prevent falls — a common cause of serious head injury in children.

From Lily comes the ultimate accolade: ‘The care he gives has inspired me to want to become a doctor myself.’ 

Kind volunteer calling the lonely 

Peter Enfield is a volunteer from Blyth in Northumberland.

At the age of 75 and having survived a heart attack, a stroke, and bladder cancer over the past two decades, Peter might have been expected to take his foot off the pedal.

Not so: even during the height of the pandemic, while isolating due to his own health conditions, this British Red Cross volunteer provided a

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