Dr Saleyha Ahsan is an emergency medicine doctor. She is also a filmmaker and broadcast journalist, having worked and produced content for a variety of broadcasters.
On Channel 4 she has presented and produced the Dispatches programmes: Coronavirus: Can Our NHS Cope?, exploring the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the UK’s health services, presented What’s It Like to Catch Coronavirus? and Covid Critical: A Doctor’s Story, which she filmed and directed herself. She has presented films for BBC’s The One Show, Panorama, Newsnight, Horizon and co-presented several series of the hit BBC Two series Trust Me I’m a Doctor. She joined Channel 4’s SAS Who Dares Wins team as the onscreen medic and appeared on Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls in 2018. On Radio she has also presented BBC Radio 4’s Inside Health.
Saleyha appears regularly on Jeremy Vine on 5.
Saleyha began her broadcast career as a junior reporter for BBC local radio in London. She took a four-year break from journalism upon gaining a place at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst to attend their arduous army officer training course. She was the first British Muslim woman to do so, and was commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps as a non-medical support officer.
During her operational tour of Bosnia in 1997 as part of NATO’s Stabilisation Force (SFOR), Saleyha was inspired to re-train as a doctor, after witnessing severe trauma suffered by Bosnian civilians caused by landmines. She commenced her studies at the University of Dundee and resumed her journalism career as a freelancer at the same time.
Saleyha is an accomplished filmmaker, with her first cinematic short ‘My Mother’s Daughter’ winning Best European Film at the TED sponsored Pangea Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2008.
Her current affairs broadcast work spans coverage of humanitarian, health, and conflict reporting, and she has worked as either a filmmaker or doctor in Syria, Libya, Kashmir, Palestine, DR Congo and Pakistan. After years of witnessing and documenting the challenges of access to healthcare in conflict zones, she completed her LLM in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the University of Essex. This has now evolved to further study; she completed a PhD at Magdalene College, Cambridge where she examined the impact of attacks against healthcare in conflict zones.
When not pursuing current affairs, Saleyha also writes drama for BBC Radio 4, very much inspired by her journalism and is currently working on her fourth play. In 2018, in recognition of her media and humanitarian work, Saleyha was awarded an honorary degree from her alma mater, the University of Dundee.
Saleyha has spoken at a number of events. She was part of the Army Presentation Team during her time in the British Army and has since given talks on her experiences as a frontline doctor and journalist in Libya and at the Royal Society of Medicine’s ‘Extreme Medicine’ conference.
