Hassan Akkad: From Aleppo to the NHS

Hassan Akkad was born in Damascus in 1988. He grew up in the city, studied English literature, and worked as an English teacher. When the Syrian uprising began in 2011, he joined protests and later worked documenting the revolution.

As the war escalated and Aleppo came under siege, Hassan made the decision to leave. In 2015 — the year the Syrian refugee crisis reached its peak, with over one million refugees crossing to Europe — he filmed his journey with a small camera.

His footage captured what the statistics could not: the terror of the Aegean crossing in a rubber dinghy, the exhaustion of walking through the Balkans, the razor wire fences, the cold, the kindness of strangers, and the bureaucratic limbo of European refugee processing. He eventually reached the United Kingdom and applied for asylum.

Hassan Akkad's footage became part of the BBC documentary 'Exodus: Our Journey to Europe' (2016), which won a BAFTA Television Craft Award. It was one of the most widely seen firsthand documentations of the Syrian refugee journey.

After receiving refugee status in the UK, Hassan settled in London. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the NHS faced a staffing crisis, he applied to work as a cleaner at Whipps Cross Hospital in London — an act he described as wanting to contribute to the country that had given him refuge.

He worked on COVID wards during the most dangerous period of the pandemic, cleaning rooms where patients had died. He later spoke publicly about the experience and about the poor pay and conditions of NHS cleaning staff — many of whom, like him, were migrants and refugees.

In April 2020, he wrote an open letter to the UK government on social media that went viral, calling on the government to extend free NHS treatment to all migrants and refugees without fear of a bill or deportation. The letter received widespread attention and was cited in parliamentary debates.

Hassan Akkad became one of the most prominent Syrian voices in the UK public discourse — not as a symbol of victimhood, but as an active citizen contributing to his adopted country and advocating for those still marginalized. His story became frequently cited as evidence of the contribution refugees make to the societies that welcome them.