I’m a bit cheesed off with nursing at the moment. My last few agency shifts have left me feeling deflated, like I was just going through the motions and ticking all the boxes on the endless paperwork, just waiting for my shift to end. Nothing is challenging me anymore. I feel stuck.  I met up with some of my mates from nurse training this week in our usual haunt and, as always, we got onto the subject of work. We always do this and it gets to be a bit of a ‘who’s got the biggest balls’ competition - honestly, if I said I had a pet elephant, one of them would say they had a box to put it in.  So, I turned up dressed to kill in my usual sloppy jumper and even sloppier jeans. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a pair of those skinny jeans but can’t quite get my head round skinny anything in a size 16, and anyway, I don’t want to look like the pet elephant if you get my drift. I digress.  They were all there waiting for me and drinking cocktails that resembled th...

Why the hell did I agree to do the night shift at the Sunshine Nursing Home? The only night shift I usually do finishes at the kebab house with a massive student special with extra chilli sauce.  Charisma from the Nursing Agency rang me at 4pm, just as I was about to settle into a very comfortable afternoon watching Tipping Point and dunking choc chip cookies in my builder’s tea. Apparently it was urgent and the manager at Sunshine Nursing Home had asked for me in person. Flattery will get you everywhere and before I knew it and against my better judgement, I said yes.  That was it. My comfortable afternoon was over. I had been booked in for the night.  I arrived bright and early at the home, and it was a very different feeling coming in of an evening. It was a bit weird seeing all the residents in their night clothes and getting ready for bed. I couldn’t believe how chilled it all was; everyone was quiet and the staff served hot chocolate and other drinks for t...

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...

More pills than a drug dealer! That’s how today felt.  It’s been a really tough one; possibly the toughest one in my short career so far and definitely one I will be recording for my revalidation. I won’t tell you the effect that it’s had on my bowels but let’s just say I won’t be needing my prunes in the morning. So what would make me feel like this? Did a resident die? Thankfully not. Did I accidentally harm a resident in my care? Thankfully not – I don’t think I could forgive myself. No…I made a medication error. I was back at Sunshine after a 10 day enforced break. Charisma told me that the Manager had barred me from the premises after I had ‘shown her up’ with my recent CQC/QVC bonding session. She told me not to worry, “she would soon want me back. Unless hell had frozen over and they were fully staffed, they’ll be understaffed again before long and can’t do without agency staff forever”, apparently.  So there I was knocking on the door this morning...

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...

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...