Playing a junior doctor in a play alongside Michael Sheen has given Dr Sara Otung hope for the future of the NHS. An understudy in the play Nye, Dr Otung has been working with Sheen since January. The play has been transferred from the National Theatre in London to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. NHS colleagues who have seen the play have been moved to tears, she said.
A doctor in acute medicine, Dr Otung said that she is usually more accustomed to dealing with patients with infections or having suspected heart attacks. She is from Pontypridd, Rhondda Cynon Taf, 20 miles (32 km) from Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, where Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan, architected the NHS, was raised. Before acting in Nye, she had already had some experience of acting as she had performed in Birmingham University’s musical theatre productions.
Bevan, who had left school at the age of 13 to work in a coal mine, created the National Health Service on 5 July 1948, when he was UK government minister for health and housing. Dr Otung said that learning about the state of health in the UK before the NHS had shocked her. Women’s healthcare wasn’t even really a thing because families simply could not afford that and would have to prioritise the healthcare of the man who was earning money, she said.
The Covid pandemic prompted Dr Otung to look again at acting. During the pandemic, she worked at Cardiff’s University Hospital Llandough while appearing in Gareth Malone’s TV programme The Choir: Singing for Britain, which she found therapeutic. When the prime minister Boris Johnson stated that they were going to stop all non-essentials, which included the arts, she wanted to do some acting lessons and see where it goes, she added.
Dr Otung has been working occasional hospital shifts while starring in Nye but will return to her job full time when the production ends its run next month. She plans to carry on acting alongside her work as a doctor and said the experience had made her more passionate about the NHS than ever
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