List of Doctors characters introduced in 2015

Alia Hanif first appeared on 14 December 2015 and made her last appearance on 3 September 2019. Alia was initially portrayed by Mandy Thandi from 2015 to 2017, with Lisa Ambalavanar taking on the role from 2018 to 2019. Alia was introduced alongside her brother, Shak Hanif (Sunjay Midda), when her mother, Ruhma Carter (Bharti Patel), arrives with the pair at Heston Carter's (Owen Brenman) house. Alia, Shak and Heston bond through cooking a meal together for Ruhma before she gets home. Alia gets into a relationship with Tariq Amiri (Chaneil Kular), and when he films them having sex, he betrays her after the breakup by posting it online. After he is released, he is involved in a hit and run, and Alia is named as a suspect, until she is cleared. Alia visits Tariq in hospital, and when he apologises and tries to reconcile with her, Alia insists that she does not want any involvement with him. While studying for A Level exams and fasting for Ramadan, Alia works too hard and faints from exhaustion. Alia recuperates at home, and after passing her exams, she leaves home to attend Glasgow University to study medicine and become a doctor.

Ambalavanar recalled that on her first day on set, she was very overwhelmed due to meeting so many people. She stated that Patel, who plays Alia's mother Ruhma, took her "under her wing", and accredited Patel with helping her to learn "pretty much everything" she knows. Ambalavanar stated that her favourite scenes to film are when Alia is with Shak, since she enjoys working with Midda, and the pair get along well. She described working on ''Doctors'' as "fast", and that the soap is filmed quickly due to having a small core cast. She explained that it means she has to "nail a scene" in one or two takes. She also said that she found learning the medical terminology included within the scripts to be difficult, since she is "very different to Alia", referring to her character studying medicine. She added that in order to perfect her pronunciation of medical and scientific terms, she researches them online. Provided by Wikipedia