Page 38 - QARANC Vol 20 No 3 2023

38 The Gazette QARANC Association
QHannah: You got a job in an Emergency Department newly qualified, which is impressive to say the least. Can you talk to me about
QHannah: So, what drew you to Emergency Department nursing?
ANicola: Having worked in a nursing home and
placements on wards and things like that, I knew that the pace of ward nursing wasn’t for me. I’ve always had a thirst for knowledge and with A&E there are a lot of different routes – you can specialise as an emergency nurse, advanced nurse practitioner etc.
There is lots to learn and because you never know what’s coming through the door, every single day is different. On a shift I could turn my bays over with different patients three or four times. So, you are always on the go, you don’t really ever sit down, and just the acuity of it all.
I would much rather have a busy day in recess where you’ve got some quite sick patients, and rapid results. That little bit of like an adrenaline rush, it’s like ‘ooh I’ve fixed someone.’
Nicola: A&E nurses overall, are adrenaline
junkies and I’m obviously quite into my sport. I find there’s more like-minded people who are into the outdoors and those things in A&E than any other department I’ve worked in.
When that alarm goes off, and you looking at that patient who you can see is really unwell, that’s when your training kicks in. You’re thinking ‘these are my steps, this is what I need to do, this is my assessment.’ Hannah: I think people think, because it’s called the crash bell in some places, it’s for emergencies only. I’ve pulled it because I couldn’t reach something and I was holding an airway, and there was no one near me. So, there’s, there’s lots of reasons to pull it, and you should never feel that you’ve pulled it for Athe wrong reason.
Nicola: I had a friend who was trapped in a
bathroom with a dementia patient who was throwing shampoo bottles at her. And she made use of it to the emergency crash was it because she was
Qbeing assaulted by a patient who didn’t have capacity. Hannah: It’s hard not to talk about the pandemic
because it’s literally been our life for two years. How have you found working through it?
Nicola: Everything changed so quickly, everyone
was on the backfoot, we didn’t know what to
‘Working in A&E is like an adrenaline rush!’
Corporal Hannah Gray is a staff nurse
on a cardiac pediatric intensive care
unit. In this extract from her podcast ‘What Makes a Nurse?,’ she interviews Nicola, a staff nurse in a busy emergency department in London.
Q
your current job role?
ANicola: I started in A&E at the Royal Free Hospital, and I’ve since moved to St. Mary’s, a major trauma centre. Royal Free had a lot of what I would call more ‘medically unwell’ patients, whereas we get a lot of stabbings and accidents at the trauma centre. During Storm Eunice we even had someone who had been crushed by a tree.
Follow Hannah on Twitter at @nursehgray and find her podcasts on Google by searching for ‘Hannah Gray What Makes a Nurse?.’
QHannah: My guest Nicola graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2020 with a degree in nursing. She moved to London to work as a qualified
nurse and, like me, is an Army Reservist in her own time. She is a black belt in Judo, having recently made the Army’s women’s judo team. I started by Aasking why she wanted to be a nurse...
Nicola: I did two years in medical school and
then decided that being a doctor wasn’t the career for me. I dabbled in sports coaching until I happened to meet an advanced nurse practitioner, which was a role I didn’t know existed. She opened my eyes to the broad spectrum of careers available with a nursing degree. I managed to get an interview and the rest is history.
I decided that being a doctor wasn’t the career for me
A
AHannah: There is a particular type of nurse that
goes into ED, people either love it or hate it.
do. I was a student when it all kicked off, but I was doing shifts in A&E. Every single time we had a Covid patient we would change all the curtains, nothing would come out of that suspected Covid person’s bay. You would reach out with a hand to drop bloods into a bag. It just wasn’t sustainable. And wearing full PPE for a 12-hour shift was draining.