Considering a defence nursing career? What you need to know

Team-work and leadership are key skills in military nursing. You can also gain insight into this career – and earn money – by joining the reserves or the MoD bank

For Janet Kelly, seeing nurses play their part in caring for those involved in the Falklands conflict in 1982 inspired a lifelong passion for military nursing.

‘I saw the nurses wearing their red crosses going away on the ships and thought, that’s what I want to do,’ she recalls.

‘I wanted to do something different with my life’

But her parents persuaded her to do her nurse training first and, after qualifying in 1988, she spent a year as a staff nurse before training as a midwife at