My mother, Naheed Ahmed, who has died aged 84, was a doctor who emigrated to the UK from India in the mid-1960s, after which she worked at various London hospitals as a locum doctor, rising to the position of accident and emergency consultant, first at the Whittington hospital and then the Royal Free, before spending more than a decade as a GP in Saudi Arabia. She returned to the UK in the mid-90s still keen to use her skills, and became a medical assessor for the Department of Health.
Naheed was born in Aurangabad in India, to Mohammed Abdul Shakur, a clerk, and Kareemunnissa (nee Begum), a teacher and schools inspector. Following the sudden death of her mother when she was nine years old, she was brought up by her maternal grandmother and, after attending the government girls’ high school in Aurangabad, in 1963 she graduated from Osmania University in Hyderabad as the university’s first qualified female surgeon. She then worked at Osmania general hospital as assistant professor of surgery for two years from 1964.
