An Interview With: FNF Scholar Lt. Cdr. Su Jeffreys

I am scheduled to interview Lt. Cdr. Su Jeffreys, Lamp Bearer for the 2025 Florence Nightingale Commemorative Service, following the afternoon’s service rehearsal in Westminster Abbey We meet in Poets’ corner, where Su enthusiastically points out memorial stones for George Eliot, Henry James, Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas and other renowned figures. Su’s love for English history is obvious; it was from her father with whom she shares a love of history. Her mother, who began nurse’s training in the 1960s, was never able to qualify once she married.

At the age of eight, Su was badly burned in a kitchen accident after boiling water spilled on her from a teakettle. Hospitalised numerous times for skin graft surgeries on her arm, she tells me she has never forgotten one nurse who stayed by her bedside at night, comforting her. That nurse’s kindness and care made an indelible impression on Su.

As a young, aspiring actor and singer, Su attended Drama College. “That went well,” she laughs. She began nurse’s training at age twenty-five. Now, as a Critical Care Nursing Officer in Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service, she has spent twenty years in the Royal Navy. As a military nurse, Su has completed tours in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone as well as serving on the first deployment of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth in 2021. In 2024, she completed her eighteen-month Florence Nightingale Foundation Leadership Scholarship.

When I ask Su what she finds most rewarding about her career, she answers quickly. “Being a critical care nurse can be a bit strange. It’s fifty-fifty, because you’re either supporting people back to life or else helping them to a good death.” Working in critical care, she continues, “patients either get better or they don’t, and as a nurse, there is so much I can do to make a physical and psychological difference in their lives.” What she finds challenging is “…having to do so much with so little. Times have changed. There is an increased patient load, with more and more roles, responsibilities and complex situations, more people with comorbidities.” There is “an increased patient flow with more complex injuries as well as treating trauma patients already on multiple medications.”

She hopes that despite these new and ongoing challenges, nurses will continue to be drawn to nursing and want to make a difference in people’s lives. “Nursing is still a vocation, albeit with a recognised, robust academic foundation,” Su says. “You really have to want to help people”.

When I ask how she sees herself in five years’ time, she says that as an older nurse, empowered by twenty years of experience, she sees herself becoming a teacher and mentor, educating the younger nurses coming in, passing on knowledge, giving them the benefit of all she has learned. She believes Florence Nightingale’s sense of a “calling” is still there, and though the newer nurses are more technologically advanced, the job of a nurse is still to look after people. “You can’t do this work and hate people.” Even with future generations, she believes the sense every nurse has of making a difference will never go away, and that it is this vocational element that “keeps everyone going.”

Though she ultimately chose a career in nursing, Su still loves to sing. “I sing because I love it now, it’s not a job.” Appearing in a 2023 BBC three-part documentary, Tour of Duty, directed by her good friend, Chris Terrell, while she served seven months on board the HMS Queen Elizabeth’s first operational mission, Su appears in several of the film’s scenes, including singing in the Ship’s chapel. “It’s twenty minutes of me moaning about Covid and singing to a wall,” she jokes.

“Nursing works best when you work as a team. That’s the big thing, bringing each other up and supporting one another.”

Does she have a saying or a quote that keeps her going whenever things get tough? She confesses that her favorite quote is from the “cheesiest film in the world, A Cinderella Story: ‘Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” That quote used to hang on the wall of her flat, and she says it motivated her to apply for the Florence Nightingale Foundation Scholarship, telling herself, why not try? She also finds inspiration in a well-known poem, Footprints in the Sand. “All right then,” the poem says to her, “we’ll get through this.”

Su’s advice for new nurses? “Be flexible, no two days are ever the same. Nursing works best when you work as a team. That’s the big thing, bringing each other up and supporting one another.” She experienced this teamwork, she says, most intensely during the Covid outbreak on HMS Queen Elizabeth.

One of Su’s proudest accomplishments as a critical care nurse has been getting through the Covid pandemic. During most of that time, she worked in ICU in Portsmouth which expanded to 300% over capacity, successfully supporting and retaining ward staff. She even saw nurses convert to ICU nursing after the experience.

Our short interview comes to an end, and I thank Su for her time. Watching her walk off, I think how proud a moment this must be for Lt. Cdr. Su Jeffreys, representing her fellow military nurses as this year’s Lamp Bearer.