The human connection

When writing this primary survey under the cloud of COVID-19, it is encouraging to see so many excellent papers being submitted to EMJ knowing that many of these have been written and re written in a time of adversity and the greatest challenge our specialty has faced. This issue has papers that cover the wide range of emergency medicine all of which are informative and interesting, but, for me the most moving and poignant paper of all is ‘The View from Here’ written by Landry and Ouchi in Boston. They describe how one doctor used her phone to make a brief video which allowed an elderly dying patient to say a last few precious words of love to his family who could not be with him because of the virus. She then sent the video to his family. It was, in her own words ‘a desire to provide connection in a deeply difficult time and to preserve the patient’s final conscious moments, she didn’t want these intensely emotional moments and thoughts to belong only to her, she wanted to offer them to his loved ones …