Your S’pore Story: ‘I wanted to be a kampung doctor, with my patients as my neighbours’

The paintings hanging in her clinic are not from any medical supply catalogue. Dr Nur Farhan Alami painted them herself, just as she thrifted the furniture from The Salvation Army and bought second-hand geriatric beds online. 

Every decision at her Kembangan practice tells the story of a doctor who chooses passion over profit.

Watch her video here.

After working in the public and private healthcare sector for 19 years, the 43-year-old geriatrician co-founded

Alami Clinic

with her husband, pharmacist Imran Shah, in 2023. The couple emptied their personal savings to open the clinic with the aim of being doctors to the community, and providing quality and accessible geriatric care.

Dr Farhan admits that she is still not drawing a specialist’s salary and work as a doctor-entrepreneur is “acutely stressful”. For one, she would go home after a long day, and there are still administrative duties such as manpower deployment and payroll matters to be settled. 

“But my husband encouraged me, and my patients kept coming back, so I knew that we had something going on,” she says.  

With patients now coming from all over the island, Dr Farhan shares her motivation for stepping out of her comfort zone to start her own practice and to help seniors lead their golden years more comfortably.

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor in the kampung, with my patients being my neighbours, as it is now. 

When I go to the coffee shop, everybody’s like, ‘Hey, doctor, what do you want to eat today?’ All the people who live in the apartments above us are our patients as well.

My field of work is my passion. I have served in both public and private practice. At the public hospitals, queues can be long, while not everyone can afford private healthcare. 

We fear that older patients may be left out, as very few of them are insured. I wanted to serve more people, and I wanted a clinic where you could see a doctor any time you needed to. 

That is why ours isn’t the usual clinic model and works more like a start-up. 

We buy second-hand geriatric beds and drip stands online, our clinic furniture is from The Salvation Army and the paintings are done by me. 

To keep costs down and pass savings to our patients, we purchase generic medicine so they don’t pay $10 for each tablet. We make sure our medicine is just as effective, though. 

Also, general practitioners usually hire clinic assistants, but we hire nurses because we use our nursing staff a lot for the care and follow-up work that older patients need. 

If the doctor does everything, it’s going to be expensive but if the nurses and pharmacists can help, everyone can function at the top of their skill level, and then our model works in being affordable. It’s all about training and support. 

We have psychologists and physiotherapists, too, because a single-doctor clinic won’t work as ageing patients have complex needs. 

I hope to scale our model so more patients can benefit and to grow our team with like-minded individuals because we want to focus on the care itself and not just on the medicine. 

I want to be accessible and give my patients the care that I hope my parents will receive in future too.”

For generations, The Straits Times has told The Singapore Story. To celebrate our 180th anniversary, we’re putting the spotlight on our communities – for you to tell us yours, from all around Singapore. Discover the stories from your neighbourhood as the series continues at

Your Singapore Story

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