Professor Joy Notter and Chris Carter, are highly qualified professional nurses and academics at the Birmingham City University, who have made it their life’s calling to help developing countries build advanced level nursing training programmes. Not basic nurse training but advanced training in emergency, intensive care, pandemics and so on that developing countries need as much as developed ones.
They have personally raised the quality of specialist nursing skills needed in countries as diverse as Vietnam, Myanmar and in African countries such as in Somaliland, Malawi and Zambia, which is where I met them incidentally in a hotel transport van in Lusaka in April 2025 and became firm friends since.
They set up training curriculums, coordinate validations from the local ministry of education and run the trainings themselves to kickstart their advanced nursing programmes.
Sometimes they are so successful in their programmes that the senior nurses they train in destitute countries get poached by hospitals in more developed countries at higher salaries, presenting a continuing difficulty in solving an endemic problem.
In most cases, they start with almost no facilities, and they have to apply for aid and academic funding for their programmes. But above everything is their personal sacrifices. Joy travels extensively while carrying a long acting cancer that has ravaged her body over many years. There is no greater personal price to pay than this, but she lives her calling day by day, year by year, for as long as her body will carry her, giving no excuses to the steady flow of young nurses in the most difficult of countries to aspire to the same standards with which she holds herself professionally and personally.
Chris just managed to submit his PhD thesis in time, while holed out in the resort where I spent two days with both of them. Neither of them will ever be celebrated as a “mother theresa” of nursing or something to that effect, but they set the standards for me in what commitment to a cause is, quietly applying themselves to build skills that makes a huge difference in countries that the rest of us will know nothing about.
