Muna Al-Farhan

Muna Hassan Ali Al-Farhan is the Assistant Executive Director of Nursing at Hamad Medical Corporation.

She remained in emergency care until 1995, when she joined Hamad Medical Corporation’s Cardiac Catheterisation Department, and completed secondary school in 1997.

She was born in Al Rayyan and moved with her family through Fereej Al Ghanim, old Umm Ghuwailina and new Umm Ghuwailina, where she attended primary school. Her father left for the United Arab Emirates in difficult circumstances, leaving an illiterate mother without income to raise six children. Poverty did not prevent that mother from teaching dignity, patience, responsibility and self-reliance. After remarrying and having five more children, she found in her second husband a partner who treated all the children equally and compensated for their father’s absence.

At fourteen, financial need forced her to leave preparatory school and enter the Nursing Institute for the salary it provided. She had wanted to become a teacher and initially felt little attachment to nursing. Four years of training changed that view. Care for patients became a passion and vocation that reshaped how she understood other people’s needs.

After graduating in 1983, she joined Hamad Hospital’s Surgical Department. Training introduced her to the operating theatre, where she immediately felt she belonged. Administrative changes then took her to the Women’s Hospital operating theatre for five years, followed by short-stay surgery in Hamad General Hospital’s Emergency Department. Her speed and competence led colleagues to invite her into emergency care. A one-month trial became four years of demanding work that left her returning home each day with the satisfaction of having relieved pain.

Promotion to assistant head of department encouraged her to resume the education interrupted in childhood. She returned to the first preparatory year while working. She remained in emergency care until 1995, when she joined Hamad Medical Corporation’s Cardiac Catheterisation Department, and completed secondary school in 1997. In 2003, she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Qatar University.

Her mother’s sudden death from a stroke in 2002 left the wound she found hardest to heal. The woman who had raised the family through deprivation had also been her closest friend, consistently hiding her own pain behind kindness and a smile. The loss changed her outlook and brought a long period of grief.

Further deaths followed. Her younger sister died in 2016, leaving four children, and her half-brother Khaled died in 2017. She also lost the stepfather who had been a father to the whole family. She responded by caring for her sister’s children and her brother’s children, whom she regards as her own. The bond with her late sister had been especially close: they had lived together at different stages of their marriages and separations.

Marriage brought its own losses. She first married at eighteen and again at twenty-eight. During the second marriage, she became pregnant with twin daughters but lost them in the sixth month. Shock and depression followed, and for a long period she relied on sedatives; her mother’s presence was central to her recovery.

Education remained one of the achievements of which she was proudest. With the support of relatives and close friends, she completed a master’s degree in nursing administration in 2017. Professionally, she rose to Assistant Executive Director of Nursing at Hamad Medical Corporation, turning a field she had entered from necessity into a career of leadership and service.

Success did not erase the poverty, bereavement or failed relationships that preceded it. Instead, those experiences deepened the generosity with which she approached patients and family. Nursing, study and the care of children who had lost parents became interconnected expressions of the same responsibility.