Nursing blog

  The research secondment   Oh Team Research Where do I start? I came for 6 months And you stole my heart   I have LOVED every minute of my research secondment.   I have never felt more useful, inspired, motivated and valued.   It had been one of the proudest moments of my nursing career.   I started in late September 2020 and the team were in the middle of multiple urgent public health studies.   The workload was huge – and at this point only getting bigger.   When the pandemic started all research studies were put on hold and teams across the UK took on only urgent public health studies.   These studies were set up with lighting speed in the combined effort nationally and globally to fight COVID-19.     To be able to say I was part of that.   That our District General was part of that. Wow. Most of these studies were well underway when I joined the team but I was lucky enough to see the FALCON study fr...

  It is International Women’s Day on the 8 th of March and the theme is ‘Everyday Courage’.   This is to honour the courage shown by women in health care.   Every day over the past year I have seen courage all around.   I have been rotated, redeployed and now seconded – I have been privileged to meet many people outside my usual circle at work and I have loved it.   Everyone has so much everyday courage, from the obvious, such as nursing covid patients.   It was so scary putting on that PPE, it felt so alien, so tight, altered your usual senses so you had to learn to work in a slightly different way.   It squashes your face and makes deep marks but you were glad of it because there was a time when we didn’t always know we would have it.   To do this repeatedly, perhaps on a different ward than usual, totally out your comfort zone, showed remarkable everyday courage.   I remember this specialist nurse telling me after a long time off afte...