Amara Okafor
Chief executive · Manchester
Twenty-two years in the NHS, the last six as a director of nursing in Greater Manchester. Started Northline after auditing an agency that had charged her own ward’s recruits £4,200 each.
About Northline
Founded because the alternative was worse.
Northline Health Careers was set up in Manchester in 2018 by a former NHS director of nursing and a former Philippine labour adviser, after both of them spent years watching good clinicians pay four thousand pounds for a job they would have been offered for nothing.
The founders
Amara Okafor
Chief executive
Amara spent twenty-two years in the NHS, the last six as a director of nursing in Greater Manchester. In 2017 she audited an agency her trust had been using and found that eleven of the fourteen nurses it had supplied had each paid between £2,800 and £4,200 for the privilege. The agency’s contract was cancelled. Nothing else happened to it.
Northline exists because she decided that the only way to make the point was to run a company that did it properly and still made money. It took until 2021 to make money.
Rafael Domingo
Chief operating officer
Rafael advised the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration on bilateral labour agreements for nine years, which means he has read more badly drafted overseas employment contracts than almost anyone alive. He can tell you, from memory, which clause in a Gulf contract will cause a problem in month fourteen.
He runs the Manila office and the documentation function, and he is the reason our files rarely come back from a regulator asking for something obvious.
The charter
Ten clauses, and no small print.
This is the whole of it. It is in every employment contract we hold with our own staff, and every client agreement we sign. Breaking one of these is a disciplinary matter here, not a conversation about commercial pressure.
No candidate ever pays us a fee, in any currency, at any stage, for any reason.
No candidate’s passport, certificate or original document is ever held by us or by an employer we work with.
We run no active recruitment campaign in any country on the WHO health workforce support and safeguards list.
We tell a candidate the salary, the rent, the shift pattern and the date of their first payslip before they interview.
We give a range and a reason, never a date we cannot defend.
We read every contract with the candidate, including the clause about leaving early, before they sign it.
We update every open file in writing every fortnight, including the files where nothing has happened.
We decline any client who will not pay registration and visa fees, or who will not provide the first four weeks of accommodation.
We help a candidate move employer if the post is wrong, at no cost to them, however inconvenient it is for us.
We publish our retention figure every year, whether it flatters us or not.
Our modern slavery statement and privacy notice sit under the same commitments and are available on request from Manchester, or by writing to the address in the footer. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under ZA829111.
The team
Thirty-one people across Manchester, Manila and Nairobi. No stock portraits, because we do not have any and would rather not invent them.
Rafael Domingo
Chief operating officer · Manila
Nine years advising the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration on bilateral labour agreements. Knows precisely which documents each regulator will reject and why.
Fatima Hassan
Head of licensing · Manchester
Runs every registration file across the five regulators. If your application has stopped moving, she is the person who finds out why, usually within a day.
Tom Whitworth
Head of employer partnerships · Manchester
Recruited into acute trusts for eleven years before joining. Turns down about a third of the employers who approach us, which is the part of the job he likes.
Ngozi Eze
Candidate care lead · Nairobi
Calls every placed candidate in week one, week four and month three. Has talked more people through a first Irish winter than she cares to count.
Liza Cruz
Documentation manager · Manila
Runs primary-source verification for every file. Holds the record for getting a Philippine university to answer a verification letter: nine days.
Three offices
Manchester
3rd Floor, 14 Lever Street
Manchester M1 1LN
United Kingdom
Mon–Fri 08:30–18:00 GMT
+44 161 511 0480
Manila
Unit 22, 8th Avenue
Bonifacio Global City
Taguig 1634, Philippines
Mon–Fri 09:00–18:00 PHT
+63 2 8540 1177
Nairobi
2nd Floor, Karuna Close
Westlands
Nairobi, Kenya
Mon–Fri 08:00–17:00 EAT
+254 20 765 4410