First Filipino Nurse Awarded Travel Scholarship by the Florence Nightingale Foundation
Pinoy nurse Francis Fernando with two other awardees at the ceremony
Filipino nurse Francis Fernando was awarded the 2014-15 Travel Scholarship Award Certificate and Florence Nightingale badge by the Florence Nightingale Foundation (FNF).
The ceremony took place on December 2nd in London where Fernando and only six other candidates received the Sandra Charitable Foundation sponsored award. Care Quality Commission (CQC) board member Sir Robert Francis QC was present at the ceremony to hand out the awards along with FNF chairwoman Professor Elizabeth Robb and Baroness Emerton of the House of Lords.
A native of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija, Fernando was chosen amongst a shortlist of candidates and underwent three rigorous application stages which included travelling to Oxford and Glasgow to further his knowledge on fracture prevention by the two most successful fracture prevention services in the UK. Part of the application process was also to write a report for FNF which was published on the official website.
Fernando is also the first nurse from the Salisbury Hospital, which he has been working at since 2000, to receive this travel scholarship. He was currently promoted to a Nurse Consultant post in Surrey and Sussex NHS Trust, the very first Filipino to achieve this in the UK.
Fernando attended San Sevastian High School in Muñoz, Nueva Ecija then graduated from Wesleyan University in Cabanatuan City in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science and Nursing degree.
In May 2012, Fernando became the first ever Filipino nurses to be awarded the National Health Service (NHS) Clinical Leaders Network (CLN), AQuA Henderson Quality Award for his work on hip fractures with the NHS. He was subsequently welcomed and congratulated by Ambassador Enrique A. Manalo at the Philippine Embassy in London.