I did my BSc in Industrial Mathematics at the University of Benin between 1998 and 2004. Nursing was not the plan at that point. What I did have was a way of thinking – you look at a problem, you break it into parts, you find the pattern, you check whether your answer actually holds. When I later came into healthcare, I found that I was using exactly that same habit at the bedside, only the variables were a patient’s blood pressure, respiratory rate, and how they looked five minutes ago compared to now.
So I would not say I abandoned mathematics. I would say the discipline followed me into a different room.
But the route was not direct. Your record shows housekeeping, sterile services, healthcare assistant work, and only then nursing. How would you explain that?
It was by circumstance first, and by decision afterwards. I started at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust as a team leader in housekeeping services, booking shifts, arranging staff cover, keeping the environment safe. Then I moved into the sterile services department in the surgical theatres, operating washers and sterilisers, assembling instrument trays, testing and reassembling devices, including work supporting the Great Ormond Street Hospital contract. Then I worked as a healthcare assistant at Northwick Park, doing personal care, observations, wound care, catheter care, helping people move.
Along the way I did my NVQ Level 3 in Health and Social Care, and at the end of 2016 I went back into study. The postgraduate diploma in adult nursing at Buckinghamshire New University came between 2018 and 2020, and I qualified into a staff nurse post at Guy’s and St Thomas’, in acute medicine and community, where I stayed until 2023 before moving into emergency care at Northwick Park.
I would not trade that route. A nurse who has decontaminated the instruments understands infection control differently. A nurse who has washed and dressed patients as a healthcare assistant understands what the healthcare assistant on her shift is carrying. You cannot get that from a lecture.
You now work in Accident and Emergency (AandE). For people who only know AandE from television, what is the job actually like?
Much less dramatic and much more disciplined than television suggests. The core of it is rapid assessment: someone arrives, and within a very short window you have to form a picture, then you act on that picture, and you keep re-checking it. A great deal of my work is recognising early signs that a patient is deteriorating, interpreting vital signs and clinical observations, escalating to the right person at the right time, and communicating clearly with the multidisciplinary team.
You have once said that digital healthcare technology should be treated as a clinical instrument. What do you mean by that?
When a nurse documents observations on a digital system that is not paperwork, that entry is what triggers an escalation score, what the next shift reads, what the doctor uses to decide whether to come now or in an hour. It is part of the treatment pathway. If we treat digital documentation as a bureaucratic obligation to be completed at the end of a shift, we lose its clinical value entirely – because a deterioration recorded three hours late is a deterioration nobody acted on.
So my position is simple. Charting is care. Design the systems around that, train people around that, and audit them around that.
Do you think technology can solve the pressures the NHS is under?
No, and I want to be careful here, because it is a fashionable thing to promise. You cannot digitise your way out of a workforce problem. If there are not enough nurses on the floor, no system will produce them. What technology can do is give the nurses who are there back the minutes that save lives – minutes lost to hunting for a result, repeating an assessment that was already done, chasing a bed, re-keying the same information into three places.
That is a real gain, and it is worth fighting for. But it is a different claim from saying technology fixes the system, and I think we should stop conflating the two.
Where did the interest in digital healthcare technology come from in the first place?
From the floor, not from a conference. Every nurse in the NHS now works through digital systems – electronic records, digital observations, escalation scores – and you very quickly notice which parts of them help you and which parts are simply in your way. Once you notice that, you either complain about it for twenty years or you take an interest in how the systems are designed and who decides.
My degree was in Industrial Mathematics, so I am comfortable with systems and with data, and I think that made me less willing to treat the technology as somebody else’s department. Nurses are the heaviest users of these systems in the whole hospital. We should be in the room when they are chosen and configured, not handed them afterwards and trained for an hour.
You completed an MSc in Nursing in September 2025, and an emergency medicine course at King’s College London in the same year. Why keep studying?
The MSc in Nursing at Buckinghamshire New University, which ran from September 2024 to September 2025, was about depth: evidence, research methods, being able to read a paper properly rather than accept a summary of it. The emergency medicine work-based course at King’s College London, between April and July 2025, was narrower and more immediate – it was about sharpening practice in my own speciality while I was still working in it.
I do not study for the certificates. I study because the moment you decide you know enough in this profession is the moment you become unsafe.
What would you say to Nigerian nurses and other health workers who are considering the move to the United Kingdom?
Come with your eyes open. The clinical standards are demanding, and the systems are heavily regulated, which is a good thing, but it means there is a period of adjustment where you are relearning how to do things you already know how to do. Expect that. Do not read it as a judgement on your competence.
Second, the route may not be straight. Mine was not. I did housekeeping, sterile services and healthcare assistant work before I qualified as a nurse here, and none of it was wasted. If you can only enter through a side door, enter through the side door and keep studying.
Third, protect your registration and protect your reputation. In this system, both take years to build and a single careless shift to damage.
And what would you say about Nigeria’s health system, looking from outside?
That the difference is rarely the individual practitioner. Nigerian nurses and doctors are working at a very high standard, often in conditions I do not think many of my colleagues here could sustain. The difference is the system around them – the escalation pathway that works, the equipment that is there, the documentation that the next shift can actually read.
If I were to pick one thing that travels well and does not need enormous capital, it is structured early-warning and escalation. Deciding, as an institution, exactly what observations get recorded, exactly what triggers a review, and exactly who must respond. That is process discipline before it is technology, and it saves lives.
Is there anything about the nursing profession you wish the public understood better?
That nursing is a clinical decision-making profession, not an assisting one. There is still a public picture of the nurse as the person who carries out instructions. In an emergency department, the nurse is very often the person who decides that the instruction needs to change – who says this patient cannot wait, something is wrong here.
And I wish people understood how much of the work is communication. Explaining, reassuring, working past a language barrier, getting a frightened person to tell you the one detail that changes everything. London is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and my patients arrive with different beliefs, values, and expectations about what should happen to them. Person-centred care means respecting that while still delivering the same clinical standard to everybody. That is not softness added to the clinical work. It is part of the clinical work.
How do you sustain yourself, doing this for as long as you have?
Family, and being deliberate about rest, which I am still not perfect at. Also, the studying genuinely helps – having something that is mine, that I am building, makes the hard shifts feel like part of a direction rather than just repetition.
And colleagues. The people you work with in emergency care see what you see. That matters more than any wellbeing initiative.
What is next for you?
I want to keep working at the point where emergency nursing and digital health meet – in practice, and in how we train nurses to use these systems clinically rather than clerically. I would like to see that work reach Nigeria as well, because a great deal of what we are learning about escalation and documentation does not depend on having the newest equipment. Beyond that, I want to be useful to the nurses coming behind me, particularly the ones arriving from home and finding the first year harder than they expected. Somebody did that for me.
What are your closing thoughts?
The patient in front of you does not care about your qualifications, your job title or how long you have been doing this. They care whether you noticed something and acted. Everything else – the studying, the technology, the systems work – is only worth doing because it makes that moment more likely to go well.