Former Bahrain resident and nurse Joyce Standring has retired at the ripe age of 95, following an illustrious career straddling a passion for healthcare and a commitment to serve.
The nonagenarian, who currently lives in the UK, helped deliver scores of babies in Awali as expatriate families, mostly from the UK, arrived to join the oil exploration and development efforts.
She worked as a midwife in Bahrain and Qatar in the 1960s, and later opened a clinic for women and children in Abu Dhabi. Her foray into the Gulf region began when she was offered a position at the Iraq Petroleum Company’s hospital in Qatar for its expatriate and local employees.
“In Qatar I specialised in low-risk midwifery, although the more complex expatriate employees’ wives were sent back to the UK or US,” Ms Standring said in an interview with the National Health Service (NHS) Somerset, where she had been volunteering for the last 30 years.
“When the company moved to Bahrain I became a midwife in the government hospital as married women were not employed by the oil company at the time,” she added.
A midwife is a trained health professional who helps healthy women during labour, delivery and after the birth of their babies.
When the company relocated to Abu Dhabi, she was approached to work with the newly-appointed health director Philip Horniblow, the emirate’s first, who was tasked to build a network of hospitals from a blank slate.
“I was asked by the British ambassador if I would consider working with the director to set up a hospital. This ended up with me developing my own clinic, where I treated all the women and children separately from the male patients and doctor, whereas previously the men would go to the doctor and tell them about their wife or daughter’s health needs,” she explained in the interview.
Throughout her career, spanning 76 years, Ms Standring has worked in various capacities, from volunteering with the Red Cross during the Second World War as the first-ever young cadet to work in such a role, to a theatre sister specialising in cardiothoracic surgery in New Zealand in the early 1950s – a new field at the time. After serving in the Gulf, the medical professional, who also worked in the health education sector, took up a role as an infection control nurse in a London hospital.
“A nurse working alongside microbiologists, haematologists and other path lab colleagues was a relatively new introduction,” she added.
Ms Standring knew she wanted to be a nurse at the tender age of five, and began her healthcare career in January 1948, six months before the NHS was born. Life came full circle 30 years ago, when she came across a notice by the NHS Musgrove Park Hospital for a volunteer to go around and check that all the patient information and leaflets were in date. She reached out and reviewed leaflets for many years.
She was also involved with caring for older patients at the hospital and on their infection prevention and control teams. Additionally, she supported audits and surveys, conducted hand hygiene training, cared for the dying, and volunteered in the oncology and radiology departments, among other things.
While she has enjoyed a ‘rewarding’ career, Ms Standring is not one to hang up her boots. Currently, she is working on her memoir for her grandchildren, which keeps her ‘busy’, and which, she says, has become a ‘thick booklet’, as reported in the British Press.
melissa@gdnmedia.bh
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