‘Eeny Meeny Miney Mo, catch a nursey by the toe. If she squeals let her go, Eeny meeny miney mo’. Not the ideal way to choose between two epic job offers but that’s the position I find myself in! Who’d have thought it – little old me being in demand!! I’m still on cloud nine and I haven’t even spoken to my buddy at Recruitment Panda yet to tell her the good news. She will be made up for me, I’m sure. After the hours of preparation that she put into me to give me the confidence to even go along, she will be delighted that her hard work has paid off – and I will have a proper job. Both of them were quite tough interviews. There was none of that ‘pin, pulse, you’ll do’ attitude, they were proper in depth. The hospital role really explored my knowledge of what it meant to be a nurse but thankfully my angel from Recruitment Panda had advised me to revisit the NMC Code of Practice and I knew it cover to cover. When they asked me about being accountable for my actions and omis...

I’ve been thinking long and hard recently about where I’m going with my nursing career.  Working with the students over the past couple of weeks has made me feel that I can’t afford to let time pass me by – at this rate one of those students will fly past me on the career ladder and end up telling me what to do!  At the moment, I don’t even have a mentorship certificate to my name, never mind anything else, so it’s time I grew some stones and got a grip.  I need direction. Training and development isn’t going to happen if I stay as a bank and agency nurse with temporary gigs, and I’m fast outgrowing the feeling of being a newly qualified nurse. At this rate, I will be a stale nurse with stale skills – a wannabe turning in to a has-been.  But the more I think about it, the less confident I become. I need someone to convince me that I can actually do this, that there is a role out there for me that isn’t just filling gaps when permanent staff can’t be...

After my disastrous introduction to the swarm of Nursing recruitment agencies out there, the lady at Recruitment Panda is my new best friend.   Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t suddenly gone soft in the head and I’m not going to be pushed into doing something I don’t feel comfortable with, but her regular calls to update me on different opportunities or simply to explain what avenues she’s exploring on my behalf are like a breath of fresh air.  She’s come up with a couple of possible matches for full time nursing roles for me but explained that the homes were recently out of embargoes after getting in a pickle. She said she wanted me to know as much about the homes as possible so that there were no surprises and I was able to make fully informed choices.  I told her I didn’t think I was confident enough to go into those sorts of homes and she understood – told me she wanted to let me know what was out there, but was glad that I would wait for something that w...

Warning! Posting your CV online will cause Neuralgia.  After my torturous night out with the super nurses I trained with, I’ve been determined to find myself a permanent post with a future. So, I took the plunge and quickly updated my CV. When I pressed ‘upload’ on the job site I felt more nervous than when I signed up with the dodgy dating site – hopefully I would get a few more hits and less abuse.  3 days in and I’m thinking ‘how wrong am I?’. More hits than Rihanna and more abuse than Donald Trump deserves. People are actually insulted when I tell them I’m not interested in a Consultant Gynaecologist’s post, I’m all for transferring my skills but that might be a step too far. I’ve had a load of health care recruitment agencies ring me too and some of  them are just plain rude. One woman told me I couldn’t afford to be fussy and another one said she had the perfect nursing associate role for me. I tried to explain that I was a fully qualified nurse but she wa...

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...

You will NOT believe what happened to me last week! It was the day of the pantomime to end all pantomimes and it was Christmas Eve, so everyone was excited. I was working at Sunshine Retirement Village. I arrived nice and early as I wanted to go over the arrangements for the pantomime that we had been working on, a dress rehearsal of sorts. A good few residents were playing key parts so I wanted to make sure that they were fit and well and that none of the staff had gone on the sick with stage fright. We’d been practising forever and sent lots of glittery invitations out to everyone we could think of. We’d even sent one to the Mayor but he couldn’t attend because he was already starring in his own local council pantomime as the back end of the donkey – no joke, that’s what we were told! Anyway, there I was flicking through the rota when the night nurse came in all flustered and told me that the Home Manager had called in sick and that I was in charge of the home for the nex...

Charisma from the Nursing agency sent me back to Sunshine Retirement Village today. I’ve not been there since a resident died in my care – it was my first death as a nurse and it will stay with me forever.  Anyway, off I trotted to my old familiar stomping ground, secretly hoping that they had missed me and less secretly hoping that it was bacon and eggs for breakfast. The manager hates wasting food, so always insists we eat what is left.  She also guilt trips us into donating something to the residents’ fund (fair enough). But with Christmas approaching I think I will have to donate my uniform and get a bigger one.  As usual the home and all its beds remain full but we had a new nursing resident called Mrs A. She has been living there for just over a week. According to the handover and her care records she has a long medical history including dementia and apparently she is also a Walker, a Wanderer and a Feeder (amongst other things). I almost choked. You might r...