This Month in Medicine – June 2026
This month, a shocking incident has once again brought up concerns for the wellbeing of NHS staff. On the 21st of June, Dr. Naeem Ahmed, Poole Hospital’s consultant in anaesthesia and pain medicine, was found unresponsive in the anaesthetist’s on-call room after working nine consecutive 13-hour shifts. The post-mortem toxicology report found fentanyl and low levels of alcohol in his blood. The coroner concluded that his official cause of death was combined alcohol and fentanyl toxicity. In spite of this, the inquest revealed that Dr. Ahmed appeared fully coherent and capable of making correct decisions hours before his passing. Dr. Ahmed ran his own private practice and worked flexible hours at Poole Hospital. He mainly chose to take up night and weekend shifts so that he would be able to frequently travel to Pakistan and help his elderly parents. His wife, Dr. Laura Ahmed, cited his cultural background and the nature of his job as factors that contributed to his reluctance to discuss mental health reasons and develop a “move on” mindset. She also recalled that, a few months prior, upon receiving a new theatre list, he himself asked, “Why can I never say no, what am I doing, we don't need the money?” The incident has renewed concerns about workload, burnout, and wellbeing among NHS staff at all levels of seniority. If you want to hear more about Dr. Ahmed as a person, please do read The Independent article about him.
Over the month, the usage of AI by doctors has been a hot topic. Supporters of the use of AI in medicine argue that AI is an incredibly useful and versatile tool. For instance, it can speed up cancer diagnostics by being trained to spot tumours on MRI scans (this may possibly save a patient’s life) and be used to “cut down” on admin work, such as writing outpatient summaries. From this, it’s rational to conclude that AI may be useful in reducing the delays in treatment caused by staff shortages and combating long patient waiting lists by allowing doctors to delegate tasks (such as GP summaries) to AI. Because of this, AI has been added as a pillar to the NHS 10-Year Health Plan which aims to reinvent the NHS in England primarily through improved patient care. Although the Royal College of Physicians surveys indicate that 70% of doctors support the widespread use of AI across the NHS, many doctors remain opposed to its widespread use. On the 11th of June, an article was published in the BMJ describing how doctors and health unions are now urging the government to stop developing the 10-Year Health Plan based on its heavy reliance on AI. On top of this, a separate article published on 22 June reported that doctors feared that their skills would be “harvested” and sold to AI developers, resulting in AI replacing doctors and stealing their jobs. An example of this in the article goes as follows: “surgeons raised concerns over routine recordings of their surgeries being shared with AI developers to train models that could then be ‘sold back to the NHS’ and used to replace doctors.” The BMA has also deemed the government’s plan to use AI to compensate for short staff numbers as a “massive, dangerous gamble”. There is always the risk of AI systems making possibly lethal mistakes. On top of this, there is a risk of breaching patient confidentiality through ambient scribing, which is a method for listening to doctor-patient consultations and automatically generating medical notes, reducing the time doctors spend on paperwork. Without strict safeguards in place, the recordings of these consultations could easily be leaked and sold. Some have also argued that this dependence on AI is a way of avoiding addressing the real problem, namely the realities of chronic, systemic staffing shortages all over the country. Following an open letter sent by doctors protesting a high reliance on AI, the government has refused to halt the 10-Year Health Plan.
Following the emergence of a new Ebola outbreak in the DRC last month, on June 1st the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced that three experimental vaccines have been fast tracked in response to the outbreak. Although treatments and vaccines for Ebola do exist, these do not target the rare Bundibugyo strain as these previous vaccines have been designed to target other strains, such as the infamous Zaire strain which was responsible for previous Ebola outbreaks. As of June 22nd, it has been confirmed that more than 1,000 cases of Bundibugyo Ebola have been recorded in the DRC and Uganda. The International Aids Vaccine Initiative, the University of Oxford, and pharmaceutical company Moderna are all working on developing their own vaccines. The vaccine being developed by Oxford University uses ChAdOx1, derived from the virus known for causing the common cold, to act as a vector to deliver specific genes to your cells which will then use this to trigger an immune response against Ebola. Meanwhile, Moderna is working on an mRNA vaccine which can prompt cells to produce an Ebola protein that stimulates the immune system to produce the correct antibodies. This type of vaccine was used against COVID-19 as mRNA molecules are relatively simple and can be manufactured quickly as a result. IAVI are working on an rVSV vaccine, similar to the licenced Ebola vaccine used against the Zaire strain (rVSV-ZEBOV). This vaccine uses a harmless, modified animal virus as a vector to deliver an antigen from the Ebola virus, so your body can begin to produce antibodies that recognise the Ebola virus. It is predicted that it will be several months before any of these vaccines are used in clinical trials in Central Africa.
Selina Y12
