{"id":1380,"date":"2026-07-27T22:22:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T14:22:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/imagined.my\/?p=1380"},"modified":"2026-07-27T22:23:47","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T14:23:47","slug":"i-would-do-it-all-again-malaysian-nurses-in-the-nhs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/imagined.my\/?p=1380","title":{"rendered":"“I would do it all again”: Malaysian nurses in the NHS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Research by Shirin Chua \u2502 Design by Dennis Ong<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In May 1964, a British newspaper ran a feature on a hospital in Essex. Headlined \u201cTogetherness \u2026 in 34 lessons\u201d, it featured a photograph of nursing staff from 34 different countries, standing in a row with their arms linked. The reporter trumpeted that the nurses worked in “perfect harmony”, and that “an idealist\u2019s dream which the League of Nations and [United Nations] never attained is working perfectly in a hospital tucked away in England\u2019s countryside.\u201d Among the 34 countries listed was “Malaya”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This newspaper feature captures a particular moment in postwar Britain where, from the 1950s through the 1970s, waves of migrants from its former colonies arrived in Britain in response to NHS recruitment programmes, to be trained and to serve as nurses. The vast majority of were women. Malaysians – newly citizens of a new independent country – were among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My eldest aunt, born in Ipoh, was one of them. Soon after the May 1969 riots, she responded to an NHS recruitment ad and quit her job in the Trade Department in KL. In December of that year, she arrived in London.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up, I only knew that my aunt lived in London, and that I saw her briefly every year when she came home over Christmas or Chinese New Year. It was only in 2024, spending more time with her in London, that I was privileged to hear her story. Since then, a veritable Pandora’s Box of stories and connections has sprung open, putting together the story of female Malaysian participation in the building of a key British institution. These women (and some men) contributed to British contestations of its self-image and identity, and navigated their own relationship to a Malaysia that was rapidly changing and grappling with its own postcolonial nationbuilding. While their motivations for joining the NHS and their specific migration stories differed, Malaysian NHS nurses undertook their journeys with a strong sense of personal agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NHS and foreign labour<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The NHS is a cherished symbol of British national identity, often described as the ‘crown jewel’ of Britain’s welfare state. Yet, it has always been transnational in its workforce. Even before the NHS was established in 1948, Britain had responded to healthcare labour shortages by recruiting overseas, particularly from Ireland and among Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.[1]<\/sup><\/a> After World War II, the NHS’s grand vision of universal access to free medical treatment required an unprecedented number of healthcare workers. Unhelpfully exacerbating this labour crunch was the fact that Canada and Australia aggressively recruited British nurses to make up the staff shortages hampering their own postwar reconstruction.[2]<\/sup><\/a> <\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britain thus turned towards its colonies, beginning with the Caribbean. In 1949, the Ministries of Health and Labour, in conjunction with the Colonial Office, the General Nursing Council and the Royal College of Nursing, launched campaigns to recruit hospital staff directly from the Caribbean. By 1955, there were official nursing recruitment programmes across 16 British colonies and former colonies.[3]<\/sup><\/a>  By 1977, overseas recruits represented an estimated 12 per cent of the student nurse and midwife population in Britain.[4]<\/sup><\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These were the same decades that saw rapid decolonisation throughout European empires. Britain, in particular, stood out for the range of moods and methods with which it departed its former colonies: from varying degrees of facilitation and negotiation for some to violent resistance for others, all while the NHS recruited from those same former colonies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, the 1960s saw the sharp rise of racialised anti-immigrant politics in Britain, marked by inflammatory rhetoric by government leaders and the progressive tightening of immigration controls. However, even the most stridently anti-immigrationist politicians were forced to make an exception for foreign NHS nurses. As one conceded, \u201cit has often been stated that hospitals could not carry on without coloured immigrant nurses,\u201d and that this would have to be \u201caccount[ed] for\u201d before the new immigration controls. Against this background, the 1964 feature of the Essex hospital is poignant, its byline declaring that “there’s no room for racial hatred when the aim of everyone is to cure the sick”, and expressing pride that the nursing staff of the hospital represent a harmony eluding even the United Nations. In so doing, the feature offered a vision of British identity in contestation with the prevailing xenophobia, a contestation that Malaysian NHS nurses played a part in creating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Malaysian NHS nurses and their stories<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

With my eyes newly open to this history, ‘Easter eggs’ revealed themselves in many places: from routine references to Malaysians in other nurses’ accounts of their NHS training and work, to a random note on an interactive exhibit in the Migration Museum in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Royal College of Nursing, Moved to Care: Stories of Nursing and Migration – Oral Histories<\/em>, <https:\/\/www.rcn.org.uk\/library-exhibitions\/Moved-to-care-stories-of-migration>,1:23-1.40, oral history account of Grianne Anthony<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Stories came forth from all directions. Personal introductions led me to Madam Flora Tai and Madam Goay Lian Choo, who were generous enough to tell me their own stories and who in turn were able, whenever I had a research question, to summon a large network of Malaysian friends they had met while in the NHS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also started coming across spaces in the UK where the stories of Malaysian NHS nurses are starting to be recorded and told by their children or by community archivists. For example, Ingat-Ingat<\/em> was a 2023-2024 exhibition curated by Becky Hoh-Hale, the daughter of a Malaysian psychiatric nurse, Hoh Min Leong, who came to Essex in 1975 to train with the NHS and has remained ever since. Its archive remains online at https:\/\/heartofthenation.migrationmuseum.org\/<\/a>\u00a0and on Instagram at @ingat_ingat_exhibition.<\/a> [Note: Let’s tag them in the IG post?] Elsewhere, Malaysian Angels of the NHS<\/a>\u00a0is a community archive by Eastside Community Heritage, in London, that records experiences and memories of Malaysian nurses in the NHS. Its title demonstrates the enduring resonance of British recruitment drives through the 1950s-1970s, which depicted nurses as “angels of mercy”.[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no space here to capture all the stories I’ve gathered from all these sources, but a few themes emerge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am most struck by the consistent sense of agency<\/em> all Malaysian former nurses conveyed: their pride in their work, their sense of meaning in their work, that working for the NHS gave them the ability to help their families financially, that it gave them independence, and their excitement at being able to travel and explore a different continent. This sense of resilience and ownership over their paths persisted even as they – to varying degrees – grappled with homesickness, cultural differences, the shock of British weather, missing Malaysian food, separation from family and – as time wore on – a permanent sense of displacement, never belonging fully to Malaysia or to the UK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation,<\/em>story of Jenny Chui<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation (story of<\/em><\/a> Linda Haynes)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Trajectories of life were also changed forever. While it seems that most Malaysian NHS nurses eventually returned to Malaysia or Singapore, many others settled in the UK or other places like Hong Kong and Australia because they fell in love, married, had children, or simply chose to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These Malaysians were also exposed to a diversity of peoples that they would never have encountered even in multicultural Malaysia. Almost all accounts describe boarding and training with women and men from many places such as Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and other countries in the Caribbean, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in addition to many Malaysians – basically a cross-section of the British empire at a time of intense postcolonial reckoning in both Britain and its former colonies. Small details in their accounts show just how ubiquitous this experience was. When my aunt described to me the people in her first boarding house (“maybe about 50% Malaysian”, English, Irish, Scottish, West African, South African, Rhodesian), she said there were “not so many West Indians”. This may seem like a small detail, but the fact that my aunt thought to mark this relative absence of West Indians in her boarding house is actually revealing of their predominance in the broader NHS world that she inhabited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation (story of<\/em><\/a> Leoh Hoh)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Further, the migration of Malaysians to join the NHS was facilitated not just by individual efforts, but community networks. I was struck by how many stories involved family, friends and communities pitching in to fund the migrant’s plane ticket. Also, while some, like my aunt, got the idea of joining the NHS from its recruitment advertisements, many – especially as the 1970s progressed – went because they knew a friend or a schoolmate or a relative who was already there, or who suggested the idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation (story of<\/a> Leoh Hoh)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Finally, it appears that the vast majority of Malaysian NHS nurses were Malaysian Chinese. Several accounts, especially by those who left in the aftermath of the May 1969 riots, attributed at least part of their motivation to the sense that they experienced or expected to experience diminished prospects in Malaysia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NHS nurses and empire<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The large-scale recruitment of nurses from former colonies did reinforce certain (il)logics of empire. For example, colonial Britain’s racial hierarchy found its echoes in the NHS training system: most Afro-Caribbean nurses were placed on the lower of two available tiers of training, even if they possessed the requisite qualifications for the higher tier.[6]<\/sup><\/a> Nursing authorities argued that the racial characteristics of black nurses limited their intellectual capacities and motivation to achieve the higher tier, the “staff” or SRN level of training.[7]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This racist policy had significant longterm consequences. The SRN was more prestigious and was an internationally recognised qualification. The lower tier, the \u2018Pupil\u2019 or State Enrolled Nurse (SEN) qualification, was not recognised outside the UK.  Black immigrant nurses therefore could not transplant their professional experience, whether to their home countries or elsewhere. They were barred from professional mobility outside the UK. In contrast, Malaysian Chinese nurses appear, at least anecdotally, not to have faced this systemic colour bar, and to have mostly been on the SRN route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I have not yet specifically investigated this issue in the available stories, it seems worth wondering whether Malaysian nurses were later able to return to Malaysia or Singapore or settle in other places (as previously mentioned) partly due to the greater mobility afforded by the SRN qualification. If so, it would seem that the erstwhile racial (il)logic of the British empire continued to define transnational mobility and intergenerational migration paths long after its formal demise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, as nurse shortages continued through the decades, the NHS has continued to intensively recruit trained staff from overseas, most recently the Philippines and India.[8]<\/sup><\/a> By 2001, the World Health Organisation was criticising Britain for “poaching” nurses from countries already most short of them, which had a “devastating effect” on the healthcare systems of some of the poorest countries in the world,[9]<\/sup><\/a> further widening global inequality. This arguably replicates empire’s structure by directing resources from the ‘colonies’ to the ‘metropole’ for the latter’s needs, at great cost to the former. Of course, the structural levers of postcolonial resource flows are different from those of direct colonial rule, and – in the case of human resources – the agency of individual migrants paints a more complex picture of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Straits Times, 23 December 2000, Page 1 (Credit: National Library Board of Singapore, NewspapersSG)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the renewed rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in the UK and contentions over the nature of British identity, the NHS and its challenges have once again become a site of contestation. Similar themes have arisen in Malaysia, as they have all over the world. As the 1960s-80s generation of NHS nurses largely return to Malaysia, or split their time between their home countries, perhaps it is also time for Malaysian society to reckon with what we may have lost or gained through this legacy. Through it all, the voices and the agency of the nurses themselves must prevail through the politics and the headlines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation (story of <\/em>Helen Chuah<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation (story of<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>Jenny Chui<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation (story of Doris Lau<\/em><\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Credit: Migration Museum, Heart of the Nation (story of<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>Lilian Tan<\/em><\/a>) <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The author expresses her thanks to her aunt (anonymous), Madam Flora Tai, and Madam Goay Lian Choo – Malaysian former nurses of the NHS – for their time and their stories, to Becky Hoh-Hale for a rich conversation about her work on the Ingat-Ingat archive, and to Michelle Yeo for comments on an earlier draft of this piece.<\/em>Madam Goay Lian Choo’s story was also the subject of a three-part series by Imagined Malaysia published in September 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further Reading<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n