Pauline Waugh is a Practice Nurse at the Green Practice at Stockbridge Health Centre in Edinburgh and has many years of experience in different areas of nursing. Nursing is one of those areas in which there will always be a demand for people’s talents so we were keen to speak to her to find out more about just what nursing jobs can entail and the rewards that they can bring.
Nursing is often seen as being a calling, was that a feeling you had when you began your training or was it a more pragmatic choice? Take us through your path into the job.
The traditional answer for why nurses become nurses is that they want to help people and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I had 3 nurses in my family including my mum and so I’d been around hospitals for years and loved to see the hustle and bustle. I took a job as an auxiliary nurse (now known as a health care assistant) when I was 16 and still at school. I worked weekends in a nursing home doing basic nursing care such as bathing, bed making, assisting patients with feeding and I loved the ‘chat’, hearing their life stories and meeting their families. I applied and was accepted for nurse training when I was 18 and in those days nursing wasn’t a degree course and was very much ‘hands on’ training which I personally think is the best way to learn.
Nurses can work in so many different areas of healthcare – Accident and Emergency, Mental Health, Intensive Care etc – at what point did you decide that practice nursing was the role for you?
I worked as a staff nurse then junior sister for 5 years in infectious diseases around the time when HIV/AIDS was very prevalent. This was a particularly challenging field as so little was known about this area and the unit I worked in was one of the first of its kind in the country, specialising in the management of patients with HIV and with other conditions such as M.E., again a relatively new area of medicine. This field led me to apply for a job within the prison service as a practitioner nurse where I was responsible for the health of 300 male prisoners with varying physical and mental illness. This again was a challenging but very rewarding aspect of nursing and while caring for people with long term conditions such as asthma, I began to investigate working in the community. Practice Nursing was the ideal role to combine both acute and long-term disease management and allowed me to continue my love of getting to know my patients, their families and carers which helps build therapeutic, long-lasting relationships.
For many people, “a job’s a job” but is working in the public sector rather than the private sector a factor for you?
This wasn’t really a factor for me. Nursing in the public or private sector to me is the same. You treat your patients the same no matter where you work as far as I am concerned.
In a General Practice you naturally see patients with an extremely diverse range of conditions, how challenging is that?
Practice Nursing ticks all the boxes for me as no two days are the same. I have been doing this job for 17 years and ‘every day is a school day’, I am always learning and my role is ever expanding, which keeps me on my toes. As a Practice Nurse you can chose to do courses in long-term condition management or perhaps acute disease or ailment management. My role combines both and I now teach practice nurses too.
It must be both rewarding but also sometimes very draining to look after people who are in ill health, do you find it hard to switch off when you get home?
No, I have never found it difficult to switch off. It’s not good for your own mental and physical health to take your work home with you. I make a point of discussing any concerns I have with colleagues at work before I leave so that I am not agonising over decisions I have made that day. Many nurses have clinical supervision where they can debrief with their peers after particularly difficult situations and plan for how they might manage similar issues in the future. This is an essential part of nursing and helps avoid stress and burn-out. I keep my work life and my home life as separate as possible and ensure I have outside interests to keep me mentally and physically well.
Transferrable skills are a big part of any CV these days, with the people skills that you must have developed over the years are there any other jobs that you could ever see yourself switching to?
Having honed my communication and interpersonal skills over the years I think I could turn my hand to anything. I do now work for 2 educational institutions teaching nurses and I probably didn’t see myself doing that 20 years ago when I was new in post and would never have spoken in public. You meet all walks of life in nursing from high court judges to people who are homeless and I treat all of them with the same courtesy and caring attitude. This said, my ideal job would be to have a coffee shop with a book shop attached, where I could spend my days chatting with people and eating cake.
What advice would you give to young people (or people looking to re-train) who may be thinking about going into nursing?
Nursing is very different today. Nurses are much more highly skilled and the training is now at degree and masters level so you need to be prepared to work hard at the academia side but never forget that the care you deliver is patient-centred. Sometimes this is lost as nurses move higher up the tree and take over the junior doctor’s role, so ensure you know why you are going into nursing – ‘to help people’.
At s1jobs we appreciate the fantastic contribution made by healthcare workers and the importance of connecting the right people to the right jobs in that field. We advertise a whole range of nursing roles across Scotland so why not take a look today?
Nurse photograph by goodcatmum and photograph of nurse with baby in incubator by Wellcome Trust, both used under Wikimedia creative commons licence.
