DR NIKITA KANANI is a woman on a mission. The London-based GP wants to change primary care for the better – and so far, she seems unstoppable.
She was instrumental in securing £4.5bn of funding for primary and community care, as part of the NHS’s long-term plan for 2023-2024. She also negotiated the most substantial changes to the GP contract since 2004, producing a deal to incentivise practices to join networks of 30,000 to 50,000 patients in exchange for various new pots of funding.
Her passion and leadership led to her appointment as the director of primary care of the NHS in 2018, making history as the first female in the role.
Leadership was not new territory for Kanani; however, prior to joining NHS England, she was chief clinical officer of NHS Bexley Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).
Her enthusiasm for the profession has not gone unnoticed by her peers, either.
Kanani was ranked as the second most influential GP in the UK by British primary care magazine Pulse. It praised Kanani for her passion, describing her as an “empowered female leader wanting to make a difference for GPs”.
At the time, the London GP said she was “flattered” by the news, but influence was “only beneficial if you use it to lift others”.
“I see myself as a small part of the picture for changing and improving primary care, and in supporting the crucial role of general practice throughout the country for the benefit of patients and the profession,” Kanani, who was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2017, says.
“There is much to do but we have made a start. We now need to build on that together, to bring about a new era of primary care.”
Throughout the pandemic, she has offered support to a number of vital public health messages. She urged the public to seek medical attention if they needed it, as experts warned delays in getting treatment due to Covid-19 could lead to a long-term risk to people’s health.
“In my own GP practice and across the country, we noticed that people who don’t have coronavirus – but have other symptoms of illness – aren’t coming and asking for help,” the 41-year-old has told the GG2 Power List.
“Ignoring some of the issues can have quite serious consequences, which you might not know about until the future; so we are urging people to ask for medical help if they need it.”
Her role in primary care sees her working across multiple agencies and stakeholders, including the government, to agree policy priorities for primary care, including ontractual and funding implications.
However, the ongoing coronavirus crisis has seen the position alter slightly.
“In one sense this role still exists as it did before Covid-19, but the pandemic has been all consuming, and the role has very much been subsumed into the need to provide clarity and operational support to primary care services, through the different phases of the pandemic,” she has said.
The pandemic has also seen a shift in the way that Kanani interacts with patients within her GP practice, as remote triage became a necessary practice.
Dr Kanani, who works at a surgery in south east London, says the switch to digital resources has been a “powerful tool” to ensure patients and staff feel safe.
“I would like to congratulate primary care staff who have been working in a very difficult time to innovate and design and deliver care in a different way,” she says.
Kanani has also made headlines with her fundraising efforts this year, as she raised more than £14,000 for a charity after walking 60 miles from London to Berkshire in October. Kanani trekked for three days to raise funds for Doctors of the World, an independent humanitarian movement working at home and abroad to empower excluded people to access healthcare.
The end site, Greenham Common in Berkshire, used to be the site of a refugee camp which Kanani’s father stayed in for six months when he first arrived to the UK in 1972. He was one of 55,000 Ugandan Asians who fled the country due to its military dictatorship.
Her parents – who are community pharmacists – are clearly big influences in Kanani’s life, both personally and professionally. Kanani has publicly praised community pharmacists throughout the pandemic, who she referred to as the “unsung heroes of the crisis”.
“They are and have been open and available on the high street through one of the most difficult times we’ve faced as a country and we really need to recognise that,” she says.
She is also close with her sister Dr Sheila Kanani, an award-winning astronomer. The pair set up STEMMsisters in 2012, a scheme to empower people from disadvantaged backgrounds to study science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine subjects.
Kanani is married – her husband also works in medicine – and the couple has two children. The physician is used to juggling her home and work life. Despite her busy schedule, she makes time to drop off and pick up her children from school every day.
As the pandemic forced schools and colleges to close during the height of the pandemic in March, she has had a hand in home-schooling her children too. “(Home-schooling) is very grounding,” she says. “(On one occasion) my eight-year-old was making cakes representing the end of the Roman Empire, while I was on a ministerial video meeting.”
Being a mother-of-two with a full-time job has its challenges – but Kanani is keen to dismiss the notion that it is anything but easy.
“It’s important to talk about working and having kids, and having to rely on other people and not being perfect,” she says.