I work with adults who were born with heart conditions. We make sure things are working well, help them with psychological and social issues, and support people approaching the end of their lives. Cardiology is a great specialism. The heart itself is quite simple – it’s a pump connected to pipes – but if it’s not working it can have a big impact on everything else.
When I joined there was a lot of hope. Labour had got elected and hundreds of thousands of nurses were recruited at that time – we can call ourselves Blair’s nurses. I would still love as many people as possible to come into nursing. It’s hard, it can be tiring, it can be draining. But there’s no job like it to make a real difference to patients: the laughter and tears you share create a special bond which helps them through their time with you.
I think the most difficult part of the job is when you’re not able to deliver the care you want to give. One of the reasons I stopped working on the wards full-time was the increased workloads: I ended up regularly looking after 12 patients, when the international standard is one nurse to four.
One of the hardest patients for me was a lovely woman who we knew was dying. It was Mother’s Day, and she was almost exactly the same age as my mum. Her death is a key memory for me. It’s sad, but you’re also happy you’re able to support someone through a difficult time.
We have to give nice news as well sometimes. I was working on a night shift and got the call for a patient who’d been waiting months and months for a heart transplant. I was the one to tell her: “You can’t have anything to eat now, because there’s a heart that might be suitable for you.”
In the last few years things have got more difficult. We’re still in what would be called winter pressure in June: we open extra beds and things in winter, but we hadn’t closed them from the previous year. Then this winter we had nothing else to open. The nurses on the ward where I used to work converted one of the cupboards into a bed, and are still nursing patients there. It does feel like things are teetering on the edge.
With Brexit, we’re already seeing colleagues either leave or making plans to. I probably work with more nurses from the Philippines and from Africa than EU nurses, but they see all this stuff in the news about the hostile environment and they’re wondering whether they’ll have their visas extended. I also worry about cooperation across the EU in terms of medicine regulation and research.
The NHS is absolutely amazing: we’re able to deliver a world-class standard of care to absolutely everyone, regardless of how much money they’ve got. It means nurses don’t even have to think about whether somebody has paid or not. I would never want to work in a system that didn’t do that.
• Life as an NHS nurse in the 1990s: ‘Patient expectation has risen’
