I'm Rehan Asadek and I'm a hospital chaplain in Birmingham in the English Midlands.

More than 140,000 people have died of COVID in Britain alone and well over half a million

have had to be treated in hospital.

The sickest had to be ventilated and were unconscious, some for weeks.

They set up a Zoom call to re-family basically to say goodbye to everyone and that's the most

frightened thing I've ever had to do.

When I woke up from sedation, I looked myself and I could only see bones because I lost

30 kg weight and I couldn't lift my arms up, I couldn't move anything other than my

eyes.

I was very shocked.

Medical teams worked around the clock to keep these patients alive while families watched

helplessly from afar.

Most were not allowed onto the cold-wood wards to prevent the infection from spreading.

So, in a high-tech intensive care unit where the faces of staff are almost hidden by personal

protective equipment and patients are isolated from their loved ones, what can you do for

the emotional well-being of both patients and their families?

What ways did doctors, nurses and others find to give those very sick patients reasons

to hold on?

Sometimes they can hear a lot of the time they can't but even just the soothing words of

being read a letter or message from their families was helpful also for the staff to see

that person as a human being with family and relatives and interests and jobs.

In this documentary from the BBC World Service, over the next hour, you'll be hearing the

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