Saleyha Ahsan

Saleyha Ahsan is a British medical doctor, presenter and journalist.

Ahsan works as an A&E doctor in Ysbyty Gwynedd Hospital, in Bangor, North Wales,[1][2] and has worked as a humanitarian doctor in conflict zones. She has previously been a Captain in the British Army, and served in Bosnia.[3] She was the first British Muslim woman to attend the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst's Officer training programme.[4] Ahsan worked as a humanitarian doctor in Libya during the Arab Spring in 2011, and then in Syrian in 2013.[5][6][7]

In 2008 her short film My Mother’s Daughter won Best European Film at Los Angeles film festival, Pangea.[8] In 2018 she appeared on Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls on Channel 4.[9]

Ahsan has presented a number of programmes for Channel 4 and the BBC on the Covid-19 pandemic, including Dispatches - Coronavirus: Can Our NHS Cope? and What’s It Like to Catch Coronavirus? (Channel 4) and The One Show, Panorama, Newsnight, Trust Me I’m a Doctor and Horizon (BBC).[3][8][10] She has also worked for The Guardian and ITV.[11][12]

Ahsan filmed her experiences during the second wave of the Covid-19 Pandemic in the UK for the Channel 4 programme Condition Critical: One Doctor’s Story.[13][14] During this period, Ahsan lost her father, Ahsan-ul-Haq Chaudry, age 81, after he contracted Covid-19.[15][1][16][17] Ahsan has also spoken about how she was offered a Covid-19 vaccine for her father a week after he died.[18]

Ahsan is a member of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, which advocates for a public inquiry into the UK's pandemic response. She told The Guardian that "You do not need to be a professor of epidemiology to chart ... the week before Christmas when everyone was going out about Christmas shopping to the spike that happened afterwards... That was avoidable and that was the wave that got my dad."[19]