Tomorrow I’m going to go to work with my tin hat on. I might even go all out and put my suit of armour on after the day I’ve had today. I was at Sunshine Nursing Home, the home I consider to be my second home after doing so many shifts there. Charisma at the nursing agency asked me if I could do a few extra shifts in the run up to Christmas and I thought it would be a doddle. How wrong was I!? When I arrived for my shift there was a whole new batch of carers who I hadn’t worked with before. Apparently, a new home has opened down the road and in a grand indictment of the state of staff retention in nursing and care work, there had been a mass exodus of the care staff, including my mate Rita who has been appointed as the new senior carer. I won’t lie, I was a bit miffed to find she had gone and not invited me to her leaving do….I’ve had loads of practice with beer pong and I do a seriously mean Beyonce on the karaoke…maybe she didn’t rate me as much as I thought she did. ...

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 ...

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...

I’ve missed my bus home after my nursing shift tonight , but to be honest I don’t care. Nursing is such an emotional rollercoaster and t oday has got to have been the best and worst day in my nursing career to date. A resident in my care died . I hope that I was able to help to make her passing into a peaceful journey. It was an expected death. We had been expecting her to die for a couple of weeks but it still doesn’t make it easy when it happens. Her family were there, all crowded round her bedside and her poor husband looked so broken. I think it was the sight of them all crying over her that made me take charge, as I really felt like I needed to look after each and every one of them too. Two weeks ago I had been working the afternoon shift when Mrs S had what the care staff called a ‘funny turn’. It turned out that she had had a huge stroke, so we tucked her up into bed and one of the girls stayed with her to stop her feeling so frightened. She had already s...

I should have known it was going to be one of those weeks. It started when I walked into the office to submit my timesheets and there was Charisma having a meltdown. Sitting at her desk head down and chanting ‘no nurses, no nurses, no nurses’ over and over again. I won’t lie, a little bit of wee came out when she lifted her head to look at me – she was physically frothing at the mouth. I rushed over thinking that she needed some medical attention, only to find that she had popped her daily dose of Berocca directly into her mouth instead of dispersing it in water. We cleaned her up and sat down with a cuppa while she offloaded about the shortage of nurses. Me being me (aka idiot), said that I was happy to do a few more shifts if it would help her out. She soon brightened up at that and gave me a fortnight rota for a place I’d never been to before…Knutton Mansions. When I arrived, I was greeted at the door with ‘Hi! My name’s Charlie – I’m your knickers for the day...

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 ...

There’s always that one carer in every nursing home isn’t there? Or in my case there’s a whole bunch of them! I’m back at the Sunshine Retirement Village (Charisma called it my quarterly bonus) and I was quite excited to see all the residents and the staff again. Well in the case of the staff that lasted all of five minutes after handover. For reasons known only to them, they had decided to punish me for my absence for the past few weeks. How did I know this? The long silences, sideways glances and no break allocated for me of course! I had a think about how to approach it while I did the morning meds. Thankfully the residents hadn’t been informed of the punishment conspiracy and they all seemed pleased to see me. It took a while longer to do the medication round as most people wanted to chat and I seemed to get caught up in adjusting stockings and untangling rollers from hair, but it didn’t matter, I would just start the dinner time meds a little later. By the end of the ...