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Updated: Apr 06, 2020 20:25 IST

Leo Varadkar, who remains the caretaker prime minister of Ireland after the February general election threw up a hung parliament, has returned to his earlier profession as a doctor to resume duty to help with coronavirus patients.

He is among several politicians in Ireland and the United Kingdom who have re-joined the medical profession as doctors and nurses to help deal with the pandemic, after governments appealed to retired and former professionals to return to the frontline of treatment.

Varadkar, 41, interned in KEM Hospital Mumbai after gaining medical qualifications in Ireland. His Indian father was a doctor in Britain’s National Health Service and his mother was a nurse; the family moved in the 1970s to Ireland, where Varadkar was born.

He remains the prime minister while parties negotiate to form a coalition government.

Reports from Dublin said Varadkar, who practiced medicine for seven years before joining politics, rejoined the country’s medical register in March to work a session a week.

Varadkar is helping with phone assessments of people who may have been exposed to Covid-19 and are assessed initially over the phone rather than in person to curb the spread of the virus. His partner, Matthew Barrett, and his two sisters and their husbands, also work in the health services, the daily reported.

Ireland’s Health Service Executive appealed in March for healthcare professionals not working in the profession to register in a mass recruitment drive to deal with the crisis. Some 50,000 people applied in less than three days, The Irish Times reported.

In the UK, Nadia Whittome, the Indian-origin MP from Nottingham East and the youngest at the age of 23, has also returned to her former work as a carer in a retirement village in Nottingham.

“I’m back in my old team in a retirement village complex in Nottingham that houses 500 residents, 50 of whom receive the whole range of care; from medication and food through to personal and end-of-life care”, she said on Monday.