As a blonde Western woman, she found life in Saudi Arabia increasingly tense. Now she has decided to return to the UK – leaving her husband behind for the time being – and pursue her career here.”What Henley has taught me is that I have a hugely strategic brain. How it was handled was amazing.” That night brought a life-changing decision. We had 17 patients in the operating room that night, but only one patient died after reaching hospital.

“So much of what you learn on an MBA is interaction with other students I found the third year was the most exciting I felt I had moved onto a different plain. I could talk to my IT department with expertise and baffle the budgeting people with what I knew.”Unwelcome excitement returned to her life when in May her hospital took in the casualties from the suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi war “We had a 60-bed emergency room, which we decanted out And we opened up 40 more beds. None of which would have come easily, she says, without her MBA studies.Three years later she still can’t praise Henley enough. Her course drew an international group of nine together for three weeks every six or seven months.

I had a huge amount of confidence as a nurse professional, but I needed to be able to speak finance, to speak technology, to speak strategy – Saudi Arabia is a wonderful place to develop strategy because people there are so comfortable with uncertainty, with the fact that Allah will look after them, that no one plans for 20 years down the line.” The result was that she enrolled with Henley for an MBA.Her current job as director of surgery, perioperative care and emergency care, in a 680-bed hospital in Riyadh, part of a King Abdul Aziz Medical City, and the corporate headquarters of the hospital network looking after the country’s National Guard, involves her in operations, strategic planning and politics In addition, she manages 1,200 staff from 47 nationalities. She returned to Saudi to work, meanwhile completing a (first-class) distance learning degree at South Bank University.”After that I was going to do a Masters, but a friend said, ‘Fiona you’ve got a management bent, go for an MBA’, and when I looked into it, I was so excited by the way it offered so much of what I needed to know. At that point she decided she needed an education.This meant returning to Ireland to do diplomas in health services management and psychology, followed by a year in the United States, doing a diploma in computer studies. This time, however, she found a country that was much stricter and harder to settle in. But then she met her Lebanese husband, moved up to become a theatre sister and realised that her career prospects in the country were excellent. Not long afterwards she was heading back to the Middle East to take up a job in Saudi Arabia. She was flown out to Amman, then eventually on to hero’s welcome in Dublin.