Bulletin Autumn 2021

Page 8

Feature

| www.leedsth.nhs.uk

Living in the Now – My journey Consultant neurologist Dr Agam Jung tells the story of how her vision for patient-centred care has grown from a remarkable life I was born in India, and in India, most parents aspired for their children to be either a doctor or an engineer at that time. I grew up in an educated family in Bokaro, which was a steel township. At that time, new ‘steel cities’ were being built across the country in order to revolutionise India’s industrial capacity. My father was an engineer who had trained in the USSR in the 1950s. My childhood was spent in a city full of highly educated engineers who had been schooled abroad. It was in many ways a privileged upbringing. I attended a Jesuit school called St Xavier’s where I was taught by many different teachers, including Sister Bertha Wilcox, an English nun, and Father Macnamara, who was an Australian. My time here was to be a formative education in many ways. At school I was in the Students Council. One of the projects included being in charge of fundraising to help leper colonies. Lepers were – and still are – considered an underclass and shunned by society. We fundraised to buy them tarpaulins so that whilst homeless they would have a shelter in the monsoon rains. Having lived in a relatively privileged part of society, learning about these impoverished people was eyeopening for me. St Xavier’s was dedicated to public service as much as to the schooling of its students. Every year, in December,

the classrooms would be converted into wards and whole communities from remote rural areas would travel there to have cataracts removed, allowing them to see again. My job a was looking after these patients as they recovered from surgery. I was also head of the school’s Teaching Programme where, during afterschool hours, we taught junior students from underprivileged backgrounds by providing extra classes. This was really part of the ethos of ‘service before self’ that I learned during these years before I went on to Medical School. One of the turning points of my school education was during a lecture from a foreign doctor who had been working in remote tribal regions of the country. She talked about giving up her life to help others, and showed us how innovative she could be with very little, such as using pressure cookers to sanitise medical equipment. Her passion really made an impact on me. My Medical School MGIMS Wardha, India, set up by Dr Sushila Nayyar, Mahatma Gandhi’s personal physician, was quite different to other medical schools in India and the UK. Our studentship came with obligations to the local community. At the end of the first term, students

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would spend 15 days living in a village alongside very poor people, getting to know the families who lived there. We would then adopt four or five families, whose care we would be responsible for during the rest of our education. That meant that any malnourishment, disease or injury – even infant and maternal deaths in the community – you were answerable for. I know of no other education system like it. It really does underline the ethos of servitude and lets you live in other people’s shoes.

Living in the leprosy colony I learnt not just about medicine but about disparities, discrimination, courage, and compassion. As a new medical graduate, I also spent three months at Dattapur Leprosy Colony during my internship which was life changing. Living in the colony, I learnt not just about medicine but about disparities, discrimination, courage, and compassion. Besides my education, there were other formative parts of my life that were less positive. As a teenager in 1984 I


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