I popped into the office today with my time sheets for last week. It was a bit of an excuse really to see Charisma as I hadn’t seen her since before Christmas and I wanted to catch up with her about my CPD training and to have a chat about the possibility of other jobs . It turned out to be pants.  She’d promised to help me with my revalidation folder - I know it’s years off but I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave it until the last minute like I do with most of the important things in my life, like paying the rent.  Imagine my face then when she barely glanced up from her pot noodle to chuck me a file across the desk. I grabbed it and flicked through it looking for golden nuggets of knowledge, some carefully curated articles I could write reflective pieces on perhaps. Or the certificates I still hadn’t received from the training I had done, maybe even a list of upcoming training sessions.  Now imagine my face when I realised she’d printed the templates from...

What’s the difference between a nurse and a Police Chief Inspector? Nothing it seems, apart from approximately 30,000 quid a year that is! Today I learnt that part of the extremely varied skill set required of a good all-round nurse is the ability to dig and dig and dig until the truth be found – even if the truth is hard to hear. How so? Let me tell you…  I arrived at Sunshine Nursing Home this morning with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. My nursing career and my passion for it had taken a heavy blow or two over the last couple of weeks but the manager and I had drawn a line in the sand after the medication error recently and I felt positive and vibrant.  Optimism will be the death of me!  My shift started out relatively routinely . I made sure all my patients were okay. I spent a while ‘persuading’ the GP secretary that my opinion about a patient who needed to be seen by the doctor trumped hers. I cracked out the medication round accurately and in...

Today was another ‘first’ for me. It was my first encounter with CQC and as I sit here on the usual bus ride home, I can’t help feeling that I didn’t do too bad at all. I was at Sunshine Retirement Home again; my first visit since Christmas Eve when we put on the epic pantomime. When I arrived in the morning, the staff were raving about it still and had decided, much to the disapproval of the Manager, that the residents had had such a good time that they would like to continue with the choir through the year. They had planned the first practice for that afternoon and I promised I would pop my head in to see how they were doing. I’d not long got back from my break when Mrs G’s daughter rushed up to me and started telling me about how the pantomime had given her Mum a new lease of life and she had decided she would like to get up that afternoon! I won’t lie, my jaw hit the floor, I was in shock. Mrs G hadn’t been out of bed for months despite us all trying to encourage her. S...