Aroop Mozumder
By Ginny Farrell
The gentle lilt of retired Air Vice Marshall (Royal Air Force) Dr Aroop Mozumder belies his gritty character. During his distinguished medical career Dr Mozumder volunteered in famine-stricken Ethiopia and served in several Middle Eastern war zones, where he quashed the horrors around him to focus on saving the lives of countless injured soldiers and severely malnourished and diseased children. He spent 28 years in the RAF and was deployed to Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Falkland Islands; retiring after rising to become Director General of Medicine for the RAF. In 2015 he was awarded the Companion of the
Order of Bath (CB) for his military service. Dr Mozumder is currently the Master of the
Society of Apothecaries, a Research Fellow at Oxford University where he teaches disaster and conflict medicine to medical students, and a Fellow of both the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Faculty of Public Health. He is also a trustee/director of a number of
charities and three years ago became the RNLI’s first ever Medical Director. Ginny Farrell caught up with Dr Mozumder in his
book-lined eyrie office overlooking the River Dart to find out more about the man who says he is “happy to be quietly in the background.”
D
R MOZUMDER joined the RAF in search of adventure and a challenge and found it in bucketloads.
Born in London, he attended medical school at
Charing Cross Hospital then worked for the NHS before volunteering with Save the Children in Ethiopia during the 1980s. Eight months later he was joined by his wife Jane,
a senior A&E nurse at the time, and the couple spent a further year living in a small tent working in the famine-stricken country. “We treated children with severe malnutrition, chol-
era, malaria and other tropical illnesses,” Dr Mozum- der said. “It was very, very rewarding. Tere was a lot of pressure but it was a fascinating period of our lives.” “We realised we couldn’t do this forever so we came
back to the UK where an RAF pilot friend in Dart- mouth suggested I join the Air Force for three years for interest and adventure. So I did and stayed for 28 years! I enjoyed all of it. I did lots of operational
Aroop with wife Jane
deployments including the first Gulf War where I was involved in helicopter casualty evacuation. Looking aſter people in helicopters and trying to improve that became one of my real interests.” Dr Mozumder was instrumental in ensuring Chi-
nook helicopters manned by the Medical Emergency Response Teams (MERT) carried better medical equipment. “Tey effectively became flying intensive care units,”
he said. “Many lives were saved because of that – not because of what I did but because of many of the ad- vances that happened over the years by many military colleagues. I helped with some of the implementation in the early stages which was very rewarding.” Dr Mozumder has the professional ability to tempo-
rarily filter out the pain of human suffering during war and famine situations, and hone in on doing the best he can to relieve it. Te profound sadness he witnesses translated into caring for traumatised service personnel and veterans -
photo by RNLI Nathan Williams
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