GP chief who juggles making cake with her kids while talking to Ministers on Zoom
Introducing an unsung hero of the vaccine triumph
EVEN as a baby Dr Nikki Kanani – now England’s top GP, with huge responsibility for helping deliver the Covid vaccination campaign – was immersed in the medical world.
That’s because she was kept in a wire basket on the side of the till at the community pharmacy her parents ran, working ‘all hours under the sun’. So it should come as no surprise that Dr Kanani is a workaholic herself, adept at juggling her career as NHS England’s medical director for primary care and her home life.
The 40-year-old is being given a higher profile in the vital campaign and last Sunday appeared beside Boris Johnson in a People’s Prime Minister’s Questions, broadcast online from Downing Street. She is also due to appear at another No 10 briefing this week. Besides holding her senior NHS role, Dr Kanani works in a local surgery in Welling, South-East London – and somehow has time to help home-school her children – son Ash, 12, and daughter Nayab, eight.
During a podcast interview with BBC journalist Louise Minchin last summer, Dr Kanani explained how her parents’ drive and determination had rubbed off.
Her father Jagdishbhai, now 69, fled Uganda for Britain as a teenager in 1972, a year after Idi Amin
‘Every jab makes a phenomenal difference’
started his brutal regime of terror that resulted in 60,000 East African Asians being driven out of the country. He met his future wife, Keerti, now 65, at Sunderland Polytechnic and they later set up a high street pharmacy, Cranstons, in Croydon.
Dr Kanani said: ‘They worked all hours under the sun. They started the pharmacy shortly after marriage and they also had me, and so they did not know where to put me – so they used to bring me into the pharmacy. So I was the baby in the wire basket on the side of the till.
‘They still run the pharmacy after 40 years, and patients still ask for the little girl.’
The ‘ little girl’, who initially wanted to be an actress but ended up studying medicine and neuroscience, is now a highly influential figure. Appointed to her senior NHS role in 2019, she has helped family doctors adjust to the pandemic, as well as being involved in vaccinating care home residents.
Last summer she wrote to GPs urging them to remind patients that face- to- face appointments were still available after some people complained were having trouble getting to see their doctor. For that she was castigated by some GPs for ‘insulting’ their work.
However, in an interview with the British Medical Journal, she said she tried to tackle the difficult tasks without delay, adding: ‘ As Mark Twain once said, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
So, I try to eat a frog, even a small one, every morning.’
Juggling her different roles during the pandemic had been a ‘rollercoaster’ – but having two children to deal with had been ‘very grounding’, she said in the same interview.
‘The other day my eight-year-old was making cakes representing the end of the Roman Empire, while I was on a ministerial video meeting,’ she recalled.
A keen runner, she had planned to run the London Marathon last October but instead walked 60 miles to Greenham Common near Newbury, where her father spent his first six months in Britain in a refugee camp. Her trek raised £14,000 for charity.
Last month she told how being a part of the care home vaccination drive had left her ‘quite emotional’, as she saw how it gave vulnerable residents ‘the opportunity that soon they’ll see their families again’.
She added: ‘I’m happy to admit I’ve been in tears many times more in the last couple of months than I should have been… Seeing what it means to individuals is really quite incredible. Every vaccine we give makes a phenomenal difference.’
Besides her ‘ day job’, and her responsibilities as a parent, Dr Kanani also set up a social enterprise called STEM Sisters with her sister Sheila, an astrophysicist by training. It aims to get more girls and young women into careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine.