Tess Pearce is a nurse working in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at The Royal Devon and Exeter hospital. She went to work at CoRSU hospital for 6 weeks earlier this year, and has written a blog about her her experiences. Her full account can be read by clicking here.
Here are a few paragraphs from her blog:
I’ve really enjoyed my first few days at the hospital working with the nurses. The nurse in charge (Halima) and I have put together a plan of what the nurses would benefit with some education on. There’s a lot to cover so I’ve had a busy week preparing teaching sessions. The majority of patients are children and I’m mainly working in the plastics department, which has their High Dependency Unit. I’ve seen stab wounds, road traffic accidents, amputations, infected wounds and cleft lip and palate repairs. It’s amazing work that the surgeons do here and there are a lot of positive outcomes.
It’s been a successful first week of teaching. I’ve had 52 nurses to teach and have been doing them in small groups of 8-10 nurses at a time. I have gone over recognising a deteriorating patient and performing an A-E assessment on an acutely unwell patient. They were all very engaged and interested so I’m hoping it was useful for them. In my free time I have re-organised their Emergency Crash trolley as looking at it was making me nervous. It is now clean, re-stocked and reorganised and has been a satisfying job. I have made a daily checklist to make sure people aren’t using items out of it unnecessarily, I’m sure I will be the one completing it for a while but hopefully it will stick.
For the first half of this week I’ve been teaching paediatric and adult basic life support which has gone well. The nurses have been really interested in the teaching and I was able to get a dummy to demonstrate on which helped massively. Following on from my work last week, Halima asked me to reorganise the crash trolley in recovery which was an even bigger job than the ward’s trolley. Just some of the unnecessary items I found in there were egg shells and a phone charger. The recovery nurses were very thankful and asked if I could rearrange their stock cupboard, which I think I would have to extend my stay for.