Page 22 - QARANC Vol 20 No 1 2022

22 The Gazette QARANC Association
What makes a nurse?
Corporal Hannah Gray is
a staff nurse on a cardiac paediatric intensive care unit. She’s a QARANC Trustee
and interviews colleagues
for her popular podcast ‘What Makes a Nurse?’.
Here, Ashleigh, her first interviewee, turns the tables...
Ashleigh: Right, so you’re in the hot seat now Hannah. What’s it been like interviewing all these amazing nurses?
Hannah: It’s been really fun actually. I need a lot of time management as we’re all doing shift work, but I record them quite far in advance. There’s nothing more satisfying than editing a person’s voice and making them sound brilliant.
A: Thinking back to when you were ‘little Hannah’ at school, wanting to be a nurse, is it everything you thought it would be?
H: I don’t really know what I expected, I just knew I wanted to do it. For ages I wanted to be a ballet dancer but when I was about 10 I clocked that it was probably not going to happen. When the headmaster asked us what we wanted to be, I said, “a nurse” and he was like, “No.” To this day, I don’t know whether he meant I’d be no good at that or was too good for that – both reasons I dislike. At about 16, I was chatting to my mum, and we talked about nursing, and I was like “yeah”, it was the first job that made sense.
A: So, you just started a new job in cardiac paediatric intensive care. Adults to paediatrics is never a fun transition, how have you been coping?
H: I think as nurses you either love or hate Paeds. And it’s the same with Adults. I’m probably one of those very weird people that enjoys both. I’ve really enjoyed looking after children, especially the newborns, because we’ve got ages zero to 16, but it’s mainly babies, as that’s when you have heart surgery, if you’ve got heart conditions.
A: So, for me that that sounds terrifying, small, tiny baby having heart surgery and now you’ve got to pick them up and stop them crying and give them tiny, micro doses of medicine. Terrifying.
H: I remember calculating those tiny drug amounts for the first time. And I thought was doing it wrong because I was like, “It can’t be that little,” but it is absolutely tiny half the time. It takes a while to get used to.
A: You spent the entire pandemic in adult intensive care, so what made you shift?
H: I’ve always wanted to do Paeds. At university, you obviously can go into the four different fields, and I thought about kids. I thought I’d be a children’s nurse because I like children. At the university they said, “how badly do you want to do this as there’s only 20 places.” So I said, “Right, I’ll definitely get into adults, I’ll do that instead,” but I always wanted to transition into paeds.
A: What is been your favourite part of your whole career so far?
H: In terms of career defining, I’d say working through the pandemic. I’m an Army Reservist so it was exciting to
use that training and bring it into the NHS. COVID is very good at making you humble, and making you realise very quickly, this isn’t fun and games anymore, this is awful. But it was an incredible experience in the sense I gained so much from it. Imagine telling my kids and grandkids, I was a frontline ICU nurse during the COVID pandemic.
A: What was it like in intensive care?
H: I was in a central London hospital, but quite a small one which specialised in burns and maternity. There were 11 beds initially and in the first wave, the highest we went to was 35. So, we tripled in size. I had just finished my step one competencies and I was expected to lead the care of most shifts. There was about three to four patients and the max I had one shift was 10 people. People don’t realise that intensive nursing is very, very specialised and there is a one to one for a reason.
A: You need that one to one because people’s organs are failing. And people have God knows how many drugs going in them to keep them alive.
H: Yeah, you have to know every single thing about your patient, what’s in their