How patients wrote ‘the first textbook’ on long COVID-19: ‘The book was written as a tool for the patient’ Read more
The book is available to buy and read on Amazon. The book was written by Dr Sajeeth Singh, a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool’s health services research department, and published by Palgrave in 2020. While there are hundreds of scientific papers and news articles based on the research conducted during the pandemic, Singh’s book was written for patients. “This is a book written for people at the frontline of this crisis,” he told the Guardian. “I had no intention of writing a book. I’m an academic.”
When the disease emerged in China in December 2019, Singh was a newly qualified doctor studying for his MD at University College London. He was working as an anaesthetic at a hospital in east London and was called back to the intensive care unit following a weekend bout of pneumonia. What he described to the Guardian at that time remains one of the most famous quotes of his life. “Patients who are very sick need to have their voices heard,” he said. “That’s what I did when I was in the intensive care unit, and I remember thinking: how long can the people in the front line be ignored?”
The book was written as a tool for the patient | Aarika Krishnakumar Read more
That book, written with the help of a patient who had the disease, was going to be the first textbook on the coronavirus, so to speak. “I was writing a textbook,” Singh said. “It had to be written in a week. I’d been doing this for a couple of years and in all that time I’d never written a textbook.” He and the patient met on the day the disease emerged in China. “I have a lot of stories that have come out of clinical practice from working with patients,” he said. “A lot of my patients have given me their trust over the years, and it’s nice to share those stories.”
As the pandemic took hold in the UK, Singh became one of the top health care workers, performing 14 operations per week, often without protective equipment. Then, at the start of the second week of December, he read
