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...

I don’t know what’s up with me these days. Can hormones make you assertive? When I think back to six months ago when I had just qualified as a nurse and first went to Sunshine Retirement Village as an agency nurse, I wouldn’t argue with anyone. I’m even a bit ashamed to say that I probably didn’t stand up for my nursing residents very well, when some of them only had me to speak up for them. But I’m not like that now. I think I’m positively bossy but I like to think that I do that because I have learnt so much about the residents and I know that if I don’t speak up then they might not get what they need. Take today for example. I’d forgotten we had a massive safeguarding meeting being held at the home. Apparently, a social worker had reported the home for mismanagement of a pressure ulcer and the lady resident had been taken to hospital and had her foot amputated, poor lady.  The safeguarding had come out of nowhere. We had every professional input into that wound ...

I think the honeymoon period with this nursing agency is over. If I was a paranoid person I would think that the ever charming Charisma had contacted the Manager at Sunshine and said something like ‘that Florence is far too fat, I’ve still got her size 10 uniform here that she has failed to get into, so work her like a donkey… because she certainly looks like one’. As always, I’m sitting on this damn bus and I would kick my shoes off for a bit of relief but I’m not sure that I’d get them back on. Can haggis get pregnant? If they can then that’s my feet. I’d best not kick them off anyway…the smell would paralyse the driver and I’m just not up to driving a bus home tonight. I arrived at Sunshine this morning and all I can say is, thank God for Rita. And thank God we have been working a lot better together lately after our little talk . The Manager told me that she had to go out that morning to assess a few patients so I would have to attend the weekly MDT meeting. Not a ...