A consultant who divides her time between a hospital and an air ambulance charity, saving lives in remote locations, hopes to encourage more women to take on leadership roles in the medical sector. Dr Marwa El-Zanfaly, 42, works for Air Ambulance Charity Kent Surrey Sussex as a helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) doctor, flying to rural environments and tending to roadside emergencies.
Marwa, who has appeared on Channel 4 programme 24 Hours In A&E, splits her time between the charity and St Mary’s Hospital where she works as a consultant. As part of her work attending medical emergencies by helicopter, she deals with incidents varying from plane crashes and multi-vehicle car crashes, to people who have been thrown from horses or trampled by cows – with treatment up to and including heart surgery being performed.
Now she hopes to inspire more women who face barriers in joining medical services. She said: “There is a shortage of women working in medicine and, while that is changing, there is still a lack of women in leadership roles.
“I hope to see that change over the years, but I think visibility is one of the best ways of combating those barriers, raising awareness that it is possible.” Marwa, who lives in London. has been working in medicine for 18 years and says that, as a child, she dreamed of saving the world.
She said: “When I was a kid, I used to want to be a lawyer, something involving human rights, but my family moved to Egypt for a while and I had a biology teacher who was also a surgeon. He talked quite a lot about his work and would use surgical cases in his teachings, which I found really interesting.
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“By the time I was getting ready to go to university, I was thinking a lot about medicine and the dream of becoming a doctor seemed practical while also fulfilling my idealistic goals to make a difference.” Now Marwa is a consultant at St Mary’s Hospital in London as well as working for Air Ambulance Charity Kent Surrey Sussex.
She said: “My day-to-day really varies. When I’m at the hospital, sometimes I’m the consultant in charge of the whole department, which involves trying to co-ordinate all the different parts of the department and managing problems that arise during the shift or trying to anticipate problems. The junior doctors and nurses will come to me for clinical advice.” On a HEMS shift, Marwa is called out to all sorts of serious situations.
She said: “I work with highly skilled helicopter pilots who will take us as close to the scene as possible. From there, we will treat the patient before taking them to hospital, usually one of the major trauma centres.”
Marwa has been working for the air ambulance charity since 2015, where she says they take the A&E department to the patient. The uncontrolled environment can make scenes trickier to deal with, which took some “getting used to” when she joined the team.
“For paramedics, this is kind of their bread and butter. This is what they’ve been doing their whole careers and they are experts in the pre-hospital environment, whereas for doctors, we’re used to working in very controlled environments within the hospital,” she said. "It’s a rural service and that can be really daunting to begin with.”
Marwa has dealt with a variety of scenes including roadside accidents and medical emergencies in remote locations. Any medical assistance needed, up to and including heart surgery, will be performed.
She said: “I’ve been called out to assist someone having a medical emergency in a field with horses or I’ve attended houses in a really wide variety of locations. I attended scenes where people have been thrown off horses or trampled by cows.
“I’ve given urgent medical treatment at plane crashes and complex multi-vehicle car accidents. We cover part of the M25 so the road collisions are often at high speeds and we are met with very serious scenes where people need urgent help.
“It’s basically about bringing critical care to the patient so they get the care a bit sooner in their journey than they otherwise would have done, so they’re not waiting to arrive at the hospital to get that same level of care.” Marwa hopes to inspire more women to start a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
“There’s definitely a shortage of women in STEM and I think that is changing. Even within the period of time that I’ve been a doctor, the face of the kind of consultants has changed,” she said. “But we’re still quite behind in terms of women reaching leadership positions, whether that’s being a GP partner, hospital consultant, or being a medical director or a chief executive of a trust.
“I think part of that is due to gender stereotyping that makes girls not consider these as career options. There are things we can all do to encourage women to apply – visibility is definitely one aspect of this, access is another, but it’s also about people working in those areas recognising the barriers women face and being aware of issues like unconscious bias and asking if they are really creating environments that are welcoming for women and particularly whether they promote and encourage female leaders.
“It perpetuates this kind of feeling that the system is unfair, and therefore that discourages women from moving forwards. The gender pay gap is another issue and we also know that the gap is even bigger when it comes to non-white women, so there’s almost like a double penalty of being a woman but also for being of an ethnic minority.
“It’s something that needs to change as it’s preventing women from reaching their potential and from all of us accessing untapped talent in such important fields.”
