Published on: 12 August 2024
As part of South Asian Heritage Month (18 July to 17 August), Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust is celebrating its diverse workforce by sharing colleagues’ stories and shining a spotlight on their lives. 
This year’s theme is ‘free to be me’. Dr Rais Ahmed, Consultant Psychiatrist at Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, is of South Asian heritage and discusses what he does in his role, his background and what being South Asian means to him.
Here, Rais highlights how his cultural differences have helped him and his colleagues at work – and shares the importance of embracing all aspects of your heritage.
What is your job role?
I have worked as a psychiatrist at this Trust for 12 years and currently work as a Consultant Psychiatrist working within the Early Intervention team with patients aged 14 –65 from Derby & Derbyshire who present with symptoms suggestive of psychosis.
Besides my clinical duties, I have been working as medical lead on transformation since last year. I have also had a range of roles within leadership and management at this Trust such as clinical director of the Trust, Chair of the Trust’s Medical Advisory Committee, and medical lead on the Trust’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) transformation programme. My main ethos is being able to empower patients and carers who I work with. I am also involved in several initiatives which aim to enhance mental health care through the support of the Integrated Care Systems (ICS).
Tell us something about your family and background.
I am originally from a princely state called Bahawalpur – originally part of India. However, after the partition, it became part of Pakistan. Interestingly, my mother is from another part of Punjab called Sialkot and I grew up in a household speaking three languages – Punjabi, Seraiki and Urdu and later learnt English as fourth language through schooling. I am from a big family of nine siblings and lived with extended family in a small town/village area. I spontaneously learnt to relate to a lot of people of various age groups in my family and that upbringing in that closely knit village community environment equipped me with skills of communal living.
I was interested in mental health and wanted to do a specialisation in psychiatry. While studying at a prestigious medical school called Nishtar Medical University in Multan, I had passed the examination to qualify for residency training in America. Following graduation in 1993, I decided to set up a hospital in my hometown. It became a multi-speciality hospital within a few years and served a large number of patients in my local community. However, I constantly had the urge to gain specialist knowledge in mental health. By that time, I was married to my classmate and had my children. It was a very busy time for me personally. My wife supported me to take the risk to acquire a postgraduate qualification, which meant having to move to the UK to pursue this. I came to the UK in 2003 to find work. What I found was there were a lot of applicants and not a lot of jobs, this was at the time I had my third child too. The initial plan was to return home once I had finished my post graduate degree. However, when I started working in the NHS, I was so blown away by the culture of the NHS and the idea of free healthcare supporting people from all walks of life that I had to stay. My family moved to the UK in 2005. We had a fair share of struggles in developing our careers but both my wife and I completed postgraduate training and started working as consultants in the NHS. It turned out to be the best decision to stay and continue working in the NHS. I didn't forget my community and continued supporting them in a variety of ways.
What does being South Asian mean to you?
As a South Asian, it is important to me that I can bring my authentic self to work and into the community I live in without concern. I believe the Trust are fantastic for this, particularly at celebrating everyone’s individual cultures with awareness days and also ensuring representation is clear across teams. Understanding different perspectives comes quite natural to me due to my upbringing in a multi-generational household and diverse community. As a South Asian, my key learning is that cultures and people are different but they are not better or worse to each other. We make this world rich and beautiful by embracing diversity.
How does your South Asian background shape the work you do for the NHS?
In South Asia, there is a huge gap when it comes to quality healthcare between haves and have nots. If you are rich you will receive the highest quality of care from the private sector hospitals in Pakistan and if you don't have money you won’t be able to afford to receive much help. There are nice people and good doctors out there who do whatever they can, but that's not an answer to people receiving the right care at the right time, particularly for people who can't afford to spend on health.
Knowing what it means when we don't have a free healthcare system for the whole population has made me view healthcare differently. I have been completely invested in the NHS healthcare model. I am emotionally attached to the NHS provides and like this model to be replicated across south Asia.
This year’s theme is ‘free to be me’; what does that mean to you and is there something that you are proud of in terms of your heritage and working for the Trust? Are you working on anything exciting currently in your job?
The NHS is fantastic for being an inclusive organisation, particularly here at Derbyshire Healthcare. The ethos of the NHS is that you are allowed to be authentic self and contribute to the same shared goals and shared purpose. Individual differences in cultural heritage does not make someone less valuable, if anything it makes them more unique.
I am proud to see clear representation with our executive and non-executive directors at this Trust – it makes people like me feel accepted, understood and valued.
I am also involved in health inequality and general equality, diversity and inclusion work which aims to promote inclusion across the organisation. This is something I feel strongly about.
