An Interview With: FNF Scholar Farrah Amjad

I consider Farrah Amjad’s current title, ‘Blended Roles Facilitator’, with Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care, National Health Foundation Trust. Consider her awards and interviews with the BBC and ITV for her charity work. Then there is Farrah herself, lamp escort for this year’s Florence Nightingale Commemoration Service, a nurse proud to represent all diverse individuals who make up the UK’s nursing workforce. We meet in a quiet corner of Westminster Abbey following her afternoon rehearsal, and I listen to her fascinating story.

My mother, she tells me, was a nurse, the only Pakistani in her cohort in the 1970’s, a woman who has been a continual source of inspiration to me. Farrah initially chose speech and language therapy for her career, then became a care assistant. At twenty-eight, she chose a career in nursing. “I always knew I should have gone into nursing first.” She realised she had dreams, ambitions, the potential to do more and make a difference. “I wanted a career, I chose it, I stuck to it, and today I am an independent, career-focused British Pakistani woman with two children. I wish I’d told myself ten years ago to be patient, to trust the process, it will be hard, but you will get there. I really struggled to find role models who looked like me.” Throughout our interview, Farrah stresses that her mother has always been her role model, the one who supports her dreams. “I’d like to be a Queen’s Nurse, and my mother always tells me not to hold back, to go for it.” Today she especially wants to represent her community, to be a role model for other nurses.

When I ask about the impact of the Florence Nightingale Foundation Scholarship on her career, she quickly explains how many doors have opened for her because of that scholarship, how her career has accelerated, how the scholarship set her up for so many good things. “I would never have dreamed I would be publicly speaking to new scholars,” and the leadership course, she goes on, “taught me to be calm and grounded during interviews, to be more confident in speaking up.” It also aligned her with the opportunity to receive the 2023 Ann Shuttlesworth Rising Star Award from Nursing Times, her proudest moment so far.

“I wanted a career, I chose it, I stuck to it, and today I am an independent, career-focused British Pakistani woman with two children.”

As a ‘Blended Roles Facilitator’ and link to the NHS, Farrah bridges the gap between district nurses, carers from care homes and home care providers. She teaches and trains carers to perform basic health tasks such as insulin administration. The work requires her to be approachable and to have good communication skills. As a former care assistant, she has the invaluable perspective of still remembering the feeling of not being listened to. Some of her most rewarding moments, she tells me, are when she does “spot checks” and finds carers she has trained and taught insulin skills to, “doing brilliant work, taking ownership of their task. ‘Look at you now,’ she’ll tell them. “You are so organised; you can do this!”  Her pride in these carers is obvious as she tells me that some have even used the programme as a stepping stone to a career in nursing. “I had a degree when I was a carer, so I love shining a light on our carers, championing them, remembering when I was one.”

The most challenging part of her work? The programme is still quite new, so she sometimes encounters resistance, teaching to administer insulin, having to overcome the bias that these are “nursing jobs.” Farrah helps carers get over the hurdle of learning something new partly by emphasising the benefit to the patient, a family member, and by helping them see their role as carer is an important way to improve the quality of that patient’s life.

The ‘Blended Roles Facilitator’ programme, begun in 2019, was perfectly timed with the arrival of the 2020 Covid pandemic, helping to reduce footfall while providing a liaison between district nurses and home health care. Recruited in 2021, Farrah has never looked back and hopes to see facilitators like herself in every NHS trust, nurses who connect the NHS with outside agencies and local authorities. It is unique work, she tells me, and roles like mine, combining teaching with delegating tasks to carers, are widely needed.

When I ask if there is a quote or a saying that particularly inspires her, she thinks for a moment and recites several. “What was going to hit you was never going to miss you. If it’s meant for you, it will happen to you. Nothing is a mistake; it has all been written. All is perfectly aligned.”

My proudest accomplishment in nursing, she goes on, is learning to believe in myself and to keep my eyes on the next step. If I were to advise new nurses, I would tell them to “not miss out on opportunities, not narrow yourselves, venture out, keep going, it isn’t always going to be a straight line.”

Her greatest inspiration continues to be her mother, but a close second would be Princess Diana. Farrah has never forgotten seeing the images of Princess Diana sitting on a brick wall beside amputees or shaking hands with people with HIV, demonstrating an extraordinary compassion for those who suffer.

We close our interview with a last story she wishes to tell me. Farrah and her family have their own family-owned voluntary project called ‘Care Home Elf’. Every Christmas, she takes her two daughters, Maleeha, now ten, and Zahra, six, into the care homes where she once worked. They bring Farrah’s former patients holiday parcels and spend time visiting with them. Last year Farrah organised the preparation and delivery of Christmas meals for those in the community who have no one. “We are all the same,” she says. “Despite differences in race or religion, we are all one.”