Meet The Team
DAUK Leads
Dr Samantha Batt-Rawden
President
@sbattrawden
Sammy is a Senior Registrar in Emergency and Intensive Care Medicine. She founded DAUK in January 2018 and was the Chair until August 2019. Sammy now runs the organisation as our President. Sammy previously held a role with the BMA and a seat on the LNC, and was instrumental in organising regional industrial action during the Junior Doctor contract dispute. A passionate advocate for the NHS, Sammy has been interviewed on national television, appearing on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky News, and is a regular guest on Good Morning Britain. In addition Sammy is a frequent guest on national radio including BBC Radio 4 Today and PM, BBC Radio 5 live and LBC. She has also written for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Metro, The Guardian and the BMJ.
Sammy has a unique appreciation for the NHS; after her son was born at 27 weeks, Sammy spent a very difficult 3 months on site with him in Intensive Care at a tertiary centre miles from home. Joshua is doing well now, but the experience has made Sammy all the more determined to fight for the NHS. Sammy is currently working as a HEMs doctor with an air ambulance as well as a frontline intensive care doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has a seat on the Women in Intensive Care Medicine committee at the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine as well as a role as training and welfare representative on the Faculty of Pre-Hospital Medicine PHEMTA committee.
She has a keen interest in doctor wellbeing and her research has been in moral injury and the decline of empathy on which she gave a TED talk.
Dr Rinesh Parmar
Chair
@GasDocRP
Rinesh is a Specialty Registrar in Anaesthetics in the West Midlands. He became more involved in grassroots activism around the time of the 2016 Junior Doctor contract dispute.
He has served on a number of local negotiating committees across the West Midlands and has held a number of positions at local and national level with the British Medical Association.
Rinesh organised local industrial action and has conducted local media interviews during and since the industrial action. Rinesh has been interviewed on national television, appearing on the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky News. He has appeared on Good Morning Britain in addition to radio programmes such as BBC Radio 4 Today, BBC Radio 5 Live and LBC. He volunteers for two charities and has a keen interest in Pre-Hospital Emergency Medicine.
He is a passionate advocate of doctors’ rights and a campaigner for the preservation of the NHS as a publicly funded, free at the point of use universal healthcare system.
Rinesh has served on the DAUK Executive Committee as Vice-Chair for 2 years and became the Association Chair in August 2019.
Executive Committee
Dr Duranka Perera
Treasurer
Duranka is an FY2 In the East of England, currently working in A&E. He is a representative for Junior Doctors at his hospital, with experience handling the implementation of national contractual changes at a local level.
He maintains several active research interests in neurosurgery and health policy, with ongoing projects at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and with the global health think tank Polygeia. Using his passion for writing, he prepares scripts for the national neurosurgery platform Brainbook, educating students and doctors alike on various elements of clinical neuroscience. He is also a published poet and short story author.
Working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis has stirred his desire to see wider adoption of the principles of efficiency and transparency within the NHS. To him the safety of patients and his fellow colleagues is paramount. Through working with DAUK, he hopes to advocate for them so that at a grassroots level, their voices, ideas and desires can be represented on a national scale.
Rob organised local industrial action and conducted local and national media interviews during the industrial action (occasionally post-nights!) He is a dedicated advocate for the NHS and for safer, fairer working practices.
Rob has spent five years working in frontline specialities and has seen the strain placed onto an under-staffed, cash-strapped, morale-sapped healthcare system. This has motivated him to become more involved in grass-roots activism.
For too long, we have let others set the agenda. We need an active body that campaigns on behalf of patients, doctors, and the NHS.
Dr Jenny Vaughan
Learn Not Blame, Law and Policy Lead
@DrJennyVaughan
Jenny has been a Consultant Neurologist for 14 years. Jenny was the medical lead for the successful over-turning of the conviction of Surgeon Mr David Sellu for gross negligence manslaughter (GNM). This rare achievement was recognised by a national Modern Law Award.
She has supported Hadiza Bawa-Garba for a number of years and has worked towards winning the recent appeal against her erasure. She does not believe that the adversarial nature of the criminal court is the right place to determine who is responsible for complex healthcare-related deaths. Recent prosecutions have been of BME doctors and she believes this should be of great concern to all.
Jenny has authored many articles on GNM and is a regular speaker on this subject internationally. She also worked to ensure that recent sentencing guidelines for GNM recognised the challenges for those in frontline healthcare. She co-founded the first UK online resource for anyone to access who wishes to know more about the charges of gross negligence manslaughter in healthcare.
As an individual she wishes to work with DAUK in order to facilitate a shared understanding of the problems created by recent prosecutions in healthcare and she leads and promotes the campaign of “Learn not Blame.” She cares passionately about the NHS and has previously campaigned to highlight the safety issues created by large hospital reconfigurations. She served as a local councillor for 8 years in a busy London borough and had a specialist health portfolio. She has personal experience of what it’s like to be a patient using the NHS and therefore understands how vital patient safety is for both patients and doctors.
Dr Jenny Vaughan has also fought against the closure of frontline services in her local hospital.
Julia Simons
Medical Student Rep
@SJimons
Julia is a Final Year Medical Student. She recently accidentally went viral when Boris Johnson visited a hospital she is training in. Which led to a string of unexpected opportunities including writing for the Guardian and appearing on Sky News. Previously she represented Hammersmith and Fulham as a Member of Youth Parliament and is currently a member of Doctors for Extinction Rebellion.
She loves clinical medicine, particularly paediatrics (though is decidedly undecided about her future career). She is also interested in public health. She intercalated in Human, Social and Political Sciences and worked as a Policy and Advocacy Intern at the World Heart Federation as part of the Cambridge Global Health Internship Scheme. Recently she has grown particularly interested in planetary health.
Dr Natalie Ashburner
Social Media Lead, Wellbeing Rep
@nashburner
Natalie is a Core Trainee in Psychiatry. She was in her first year of foundation training during the Junior Doctor Contract dispute and industrial action and her involvement in the strikes led her to take a more active role in representing doctors at a grassroots level.
She is currently involved in the BMA Thames Valley rJDC and on the Royal College of Psychiatry public engagement committee and psychiatry trainees committee.
Being a psychiatry trainee, Natalie is particularly passionate about the mental wellbeing of doctors and the effects that working in a high pressure, strained environment like the NHS has on them.
Her day to day job often means working with some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged populations in the UK, reinforcing her belief that the NHS must always be free at the point of need.
Dr Rebecca Lewis
General Secretary
@drrebeccalewis
Becky is a registrar in General and Oncoplastic breast surgery in London, and is due to finish training mid-2020. She is currently completing her masters and has undertaken training in medical leadership. She has been a mentor to medical students hoping to become surgeons through a national scheme since 2011, and was vice chair of the national breast surgical trainees group from 2017 to 2018. She has been involved in campaigning since the junior doctor contract dispute of 2016.
After a particularly horrible training experience, she has a keen interest in bullying and believes that this practice has no place in the NHS. She also has an interest in supporting whistleblowers and has shown a keen interest in our ‘Learn not Blame’ campaign. Outside medicine, she has been a member of the field of play athletics team for the World Championships and World Para-athletics Championships in London and spends most free time with her 2 year old son, Sebastian.
Dr Zainab Najim
Co-Secretary
Profile coming soon
Social Media Team
Dr Matt Kneale
Matt is an FY1 doctor working in Manchester. Prior to medical school he was involved in global health research and part of the team that pushed for better access to essential antimicrobials globally. His main clinical interests are acute general medicine and infectious diseases, whilst outside of medicine enjoys photography, playing guitar and travelling.
Recent high profile controversies such as the Junior Doctor Contract dispute in 2016, and the Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba case, have led to him becoming a vocal supporter for the rights of medical professionals and is eager to push for better safeguards for doctors.
Dr Roshni Shah
Roshni was born and raised in London, moved to Prague to complete her Medical degree and is now back in London working for the NHS. She is passionate about advocating for Junior Doctors, in particular those from a BAME background of International Medical Graduates. Most recently she has been working as a Junior Clinical Fellow in A&E in London and is applying for ACCS EM training.
She has been interested in understanding how healthcare systems work in other countries and has therefore spent time working in hospitals internationally including India, Tanzania and Argentina. She also completed a summer internship in Business Development at Stanford, California which launched her interest in Medical Technology.
During her spare time she enjoys baking and playing (attempting) the Ukulele.
Miss Anna Sutton
Anna is a fourth year medical student, though studies have been cut short during the Covid-19 crisis. Next academic year she plans to complete a Masters in Healthcare Ethics and Law. When choosing University projects she invariably picks the artiest option possible, last year completing an essay on the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why” and how far it followed guidance on portraying suicide. She presented this as a poster in November 2019 at the Northwest Psychiatry conference.
Anna is interested in discussing mental health within the medical profession, and has created a mental health pin-board within the University, for students and staff to share their experiences in creative ways. She hopes this will help start conversations about mental health early in medical students’ careers and reduce stigma.
Dr Kaveri Jalundhwala
Kaveri is a GP ST2 in Bucks who has been passionate about defending doctors and their right to a safe working practices, particularly after the 2016 Junior Doctor Contract. She had previously been in DAUK as part of the editorial team, and after noticing the problems on the frontline during the coronovirus pandemic, decided to rejoin DAUK to help in any way she can. She is interested in health care leadership and was part of an innovative programme utlising a group of junior doctors to come up with ways to transform the local outpatients service. She plans to explore roles in leadership and improvement in General Practice in the future.
Areas of particular interest include: women in medicine, general practice and its link with secondary care, expedition medicine, mental health and the perspective of being a patient (having had medical issues in the last year). Having straddled 2 cultures, being from an Indian background, lived in Singapore for 9 years, and then moved to England – I feel quite passionate about ensuring there is a diverse and accepting culture in the NHS.
Dr Emily Yeung
Emily is an ACCS acute medicine trainee currently based in the North East of England.
Her interest in advocating for junior doctors for a voice on the national platform recently started amidst discussion surrounding training pathways during the core medical curriculum transition. Joining the DAUK social media team coincidently allowed her to put her amateur passion of graphic design to use. Through working with the DAUK, she also hopes to help establish a greater presence for the organisation in the North, to ensure that doctors throughout different regions are supported and their voices heard.
Editorial team
Our team of frontline doctors who write feature articles and create content on behalf of DAUK.
Mr Dolin Bhagawati
Neurosurgeon & Lead Editor
Dr Samantha Batt-Rawden
Intensive Care Doctor
Mr Felix Brewer
Core Surgical Trainee
Dr Matt Kneale
FY1 Doctor
Dr Katie Sanderson
Clinical Fellow
Dr Duranka Perera
Foundation Doctor
GP Advisory Group
Our team of frontline GPs and GP trainees advocating for primary care.
Dr Vinesh Patel
GP Partner
Dr Elizabeth Toberty
GP
Dr Sophie Rowlands
GP
Dr Zainab Najim
GP Trainee
Dr Kaveri Jalundhwala
GP Trainee
Learn not Blame Team
Our volunteer team working towards a just culture in healthcare.
Dr Jenny Vaughan
Consultant Neurologist
Dr Ben Evans
Foundation Year Doctor
Dr David Nicholl
Consultant Neurologist
Dr Saurabh Bahl
Core Psychiatry Trainee
Dr Katie Sanderson
Clinical Fellow