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professionals from the healthcare assistants up to the consultant in resuscitation. We deal with cardiac arrests quite regularly. On top of that, we do a lot of auditing to sure everything’s safe, the equipment, and in date.
Hannah: What drew you to that role, and what do you enjoy most about it?
Ronan: I always enjoyed working in critical care and I always like being on the sharp edge and being able to comfort family members. I enjoy turning the tide for patients to get them back to the best level of life we can. In the intensive care unit, I’ve enjoyed how when the resus officer came everyone would breathe a sigh of relief, and I thought: I would like to be that person.
Hannah: I definitely agree with that when you popped in whenever I’ve been at a cardiac arrest, everyone’s like, ‘okay, we’re in control now.’ What was it like working at sea as a nurse?
Ronan: Great. I was on board what look like a pirate ship, it had three masts and 24 sails, and would bringing people with disabilities sailing and on board as crew. It was like a 50-50 ratio of people with disabilities and able bodied. So, we would sail under wind it allowed me to travel the world for very little money.
Hannah: What an amazing experience to have. How have your experiences professionally or personally shaped and influenced you as a nurse?
Ronan: When I was a junior nurse on the ship it gave me insight into people with disabilities living an ordinary life. Someone who was blind steering a tall ship into port, someone in a wheelchair being hoisted up into sails.
Other things that shaped me as a nurse was the experience of dealing with patients and their relatives, building strong bonds. My father died a couple years ago from cancer. I got to see healthcare from the other side, and it give me a huge amount of pride to be associated with the profession of nursing. It also gave me insight into how families feel when their relative is in the hands of strangers.
Hannah: I’m sorry that you had to go through that but it’s good to hear that you’ve taken something positive from it because you can use that experience to help other families. It’s hard not to talk about the pandemic. It’s affected our work very much in the last year or so. What was your experience like?
Ronan: That was a hugely difficult time in my career. And one that is now almost vague in memory because so many things happened at one time. I
was in the middle of my officer training for Royal Air Force when the pandemic hit. The training stopped and we were sent back to our NHS jobs.
I was tasked to create a course for non-intensive care nurses to work in ICUs. All allied health care professionals, pharmacists, physios, occupational therapists, surgeons, dermatologists, we trained about 1,200 people in the space of six weeks. You were dealing with raw emotion each day and people feeling vulnerable that they were being sent to intensive care. People had a sense of excitement in going to the coalface where Covid was, and then and then you had the opposite, where people were terrified.
Hannah: You also noticed a gap in training for the intensive care nurses themselves during this time. Can you talk a bit about that?
Ronan: As I was training these people, I realised no-one was telling the intensive care nurse these were coming and there was no specific plan for them to be inducted. A huge amount of my officer training in the RAF was leadership training. I realised very quickly that intensive care nurses had become leaders overnight and would benefit from having some leadership training. I contacted my training Flight Lieutenant from RAF Hanwell, Michael Doyle, and he helped me write a leadership course and will be able to be delivered to nurses on site.
So, I pushed and pushed and eventually I got four nurses and we went through two and a half hours’ of leadership training and they loved it. Word spread quickly and another hospital got in contact and asked, ‘Can I go and train them?’ I was going around hospitals and doing Train the Trainer sessions.
I was asked to go on and present this at a NATO conference in Estonia. I came back to Health Education England asking me if I could roll it out across England. I did virtual sessions of training the trainer for intensive cares all around the country.
Hannah: I have no words. It’s just genuinely incredible what you’ve done. And I can say this as someone that has attended one of your sessions. Another tip I loved was on your break, chat to your team about things other
than Covid because it makes them feel comfortable enough to come to you when something goes wrong.
How important do you think it is to develop leadership skills in student nurses, junior nurses and throughout a nurse’s career?
Ronan: One of the big problems during the pandemic was nobody told intensive care nurses they were in leadership positions and because they don’t realise it, they don’t act accordingly. Then their followers don’t act accordingly. So, it is vitally important that student nurses and nurses alike are given appropriate leadership training. In the military, when you get a promotion, you get a course that goes alongside your promotion.
Hannah: What are your plans for the future?
Ronan: I’m in my new position of being a Flight Lieutenant and a nursing officer. I’m settling a new role within my hospital, and I’ve just started my masters as well. I don’t really like breaks – I like to crack on.
Hannah: My final question is what makes a nurse?
Ronan: I think overall someone who wants to be a nurse. If you want to do it you will hold a huge amount of the traits that a nurse should have. They need to be humble, caring, they need to be clinically sound, up to date. They need to want to learn more about their clinical skills, be a person who can relate to all members of society and treat them accordingly. And personally, I like a nurse status who is very calm. That calmness is contagious to their colleagues and ultimately, down to the patients.
Hannah: I must the work you did during the pandemic was incredible. And the work you are continuing to do is truly inspiring.
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Follow Hannah on Twitter at @nursehgray and find her podcasts on Google by searching for ‘Hannah Gray What Makes a Nurse?.’