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Anonymous heroes from the Covid-19 pandemic make up nearly a third of the queen’s birthday honor roll.
Felicia Kwaku, 52, associate director of nursing at the King’s College NHS Trust Trust, said her OBE was for “fallen colleagues.”
“We saw in March and April that nurses and midwives were dying. For many of us that was not acceptable and we knew that we had to respond in a different way, ”said Kwaku, who lost an uncle and also a medical colleague, Dr. Alfa Saadu, to the virus.
“So the honor honors all those who put their lives on the line and continued to serve … these are my fallen colleagues.”
Kwaku, chair of the director of nursing’s African American and Ethnic Minorities Strategic Advisory Group, championed the cause of Filipino nurses disproportionately affected by the pandemic. She described heartbreaking stories of nurses of not having enough PPE, of masks that don’t fit very well with “Asian traits,” and of hearing about colleagues getting very sick while working.
Black and ethnic minority nurses and midwives were particularly scared of contracting Covid-19, he said. She helped gather better risk assessments to make conditions safer. By the end of May, he had counted 77 nurses and midwives who had died. “Except for three or four,” he said, they were all black or Asian.
Jay Flynn, 38, receives an MBE after transferring his weekly pub contest online and raising over £ 750,000. The money is split between health charities, with a donation also to the London-based St Martin-in-the-Fields homeless charity Connection, which saved him when he slept on the street a decade ago. .
Social workers for the charity found him on Victoria Embankment, where he had slept for two years. “My sanity was on its knees at the time,” said Flynn, a married father living in Darwen, Lancashire. “They rebuilt from the shell that I was.”
The donation will help with the costs incurred by the charity to house the sleepers on the street during the pandemic. “I always said that when I could and when the opportunity presented itself, I would pay off a debt that I felt I owed them,” he said.
David Maguire, 62, a restaurateur from Glasgow, receives an MBE after providing “significantly more than 100,000” free meals for hospital workers, vulnerable and isolated people and children who miss free school meals during the shutdown. He said of his nomination that it was “surreal to think that someone had realized what we were doing.”
Jolene Miller, 42, a former paramedic turned train driver from Stockton, Co Durham, became a volunteer paramedic caring for critically ill patients while continuing her work on Northern Trains. He arranged with his bosses to work a week, a week off, “a week on the NHS and a week on the trains.”
Receive a British Empire Medal (BEM). Miller said: “It was exhausting, as it was for everyone who is working on the front line, and I had that week on the train to recover as well, whereas my colleagues on the NHS did not have that week to recover.”
She added, “The fact that someone else nominated me is a great thing.”
