Nurse Specialist Adviser
Addenbrookes Hospital

Angela D

00:00:01 My name’s Angela D and I’m a Nurse Specialist Adviser for moving and handling. I work for a group at … Risk Management, and the title means that I’m a nurse by trade and – but I’ve gone into a speciality where I’m actually advising staff about how they move and handle patients and loads. Our staff in all sorts of our areas, move other than patients, bits of equipment, could be cameras, could be video stacks in theatres, so we advise them how to do it the safest way. Came into it because I had always been a key worker, link trainer, in the departments that I’d worked in in the Trust before, and I’d always had an interest on staff safety. And so wherever I’ve gone I’ve taken on a role of trying to encourage staff to take on safe moves with their patients, so that they’re safe and the patients are safe.

00:00:55 It wasn’t a direction I immediately thought of. It’s something that I tagged on to my normal role as a nursing duty, as a nursing role, it was an extended role that you did. I realised actually when a job came up I was very interested in it, and it was something that I thought maybe I would go into.

00:01:17 I had a very good teacher at school, seems a long time ago, who was very very keen on encouraging us then to think of careers that you could go into, so career advice. And when we had a speaker come in and talk about what she did, she was a Sister on a ward, and she gave a very inspiring talk about what nursing involved, and I never thought of doing anything different. I don’t think I ever thought I would be doing it as long as I have, but I’ve changed my roles quite regularly while I’ve been doing my nursing career.

00:01:58 I started originally with orthopaedic nursing, which is very much looking at bones and patients that have had muscular problems. I then went on and did my general nursing training, and looked after patients in a general nursing hospital. And I worked then in the community, and worked as a Community Sister for quite some time. Worked in clinics in South Africa, and came back here, and then came back and did a return to nursing course, which was terrifying at the time – back into Addenbrookes. That’s where I started doing that.

00:02:32 South Africa different – we were over there at a time when it was Apartheid. The clinic situation that I worked in, it was very much an Apartheid system, the segregation I found extremely difficult, and I – it wasn’t something that as a family we dealt with very well. We enjoyed our stay there but we came home in the end. Yes, a difficult situation, and something that you had to get used to, something that you didn’t always accept, but it was something you had to deal with because it was the country you were living in at the time.

00:03:10 One of the high points probably is – I came back in, as I say, I did a return to nursing course – to be feeling very confident and competent on a ward once I’d done that to be able to take – take on board all the things a ward can throw at you. And actually not think, I can’t deal with this. It actually gives you a huge boost because you think – well , you know, whatever comes into this ward, I’m going to cope with this.

00:03:43 We see patients very very poorly, possibly dying. We see patients that have improved greatly, and we see them leave the Trust. It’s lovely. Make the most of your life, do whatever you can when you can do it, because you never know what’s round the corner.

00:04:02 ENDS