Making a difference - celebrating the Year of the Nurse and Midwife

2020 is the Year of the Nurse and Midwife and a chance to showcase and celebrate our nurses across the Trust and to renew perceptions of the profession. We want to take this opportunity to thank our nurses for their diverse talents and expertise and to promote nursing as a career with a great deal to offer.

Ruth Harrison is an acute learning disabilities nurse and is sharing her story of why she chose nursing as a career and how she is making a difference.

Ruth Harrison

On a typical day 

No two days are the same! The days are varied with a variety of strategic processes, which may include implementing new ideas to better aid the identification, admission/discharge and reasonable adjustment supports for people with learning disabilities, or it can be planning events that support the whole community.

Why did you choose nursing as a career? 

I started off working in a residential home. I loved getting to know about the residents' pasts and seeing them smile as they reminisced. As I then became a ‘proper’ adult with the responsibility of a mortgage I descended into an agency auxiliary position working at many of the local hospitals. I was lucky enough to have a placement at Highbury hospital on the day service site and I suddenly found my passion for learning disabilities. I progressed into nursing shortly after.

The ironic thing is I had an older brother with a learning disability who sadly died in 2019. I remember him going into ‘special school’ but then had no transition service into adulthood, which meant I never saw the provisions in place for people or the nursing careers on offer. I found it eventually though, which now means I get to ensure processes can be in place to support people like my brother. 

How are you making a difference as a nurse?

As mentioned, my brother is my driving force. I like to make sure that even if people are not known to services for having a formal diagnosis, that I still make myself available to offer guidance to all parties involved.

Also, spreading awareness of diagnostic overshadowing in a variety of ways and implementing tools to support people to make decisions for themselves is so rewarding. Being energetic and enthusiastic draws in others to help me in my plight for equity for example: The creation of the Sepsis Aware Bear campaign which is now evolving to incorporate immunisation and screening. The bears are now ‘viral’.

What do you enjoy most about nursing?

I love coming up with new innovative ideas that can better improve processes including identification, making services accessible, motivating others, creating workstreams that embed excellent practice and service delivery etc. Some of this work won a Health Service Journal Award in 2018 and the National Learning Disability Awards in 2019 – which meant I got to wear a posh frock! All of this has been achieved by thinking and working ‘outside the box’ with professionals from a variety of backgrounds, which makes no two days the same. Seeing people access a service that can be so scary and intimidating and having all the professionals work together to make it a less scary experience is immense.

This interview took place just before the Coronvirus pandemic and the lockdown. We since caught up with Ruth to find out how she has been working differently to support patients during this time.

How are you supporting patients during the current Covid-19 pandemic and what challenges have you had to overcome?  

The wards at the hospital remain responsive when it comes to meeting the needs of people with learning disabilities. Those where close working relationships were forged prior to the outbreak remain strong, with a steady flow of calls simply to reassure that they are doing everything possible for a person with a learning disability.

For wards where support was of a minimal nature prior to the outbreak, they have been reminded of the service and are more reactive to informing me of a person’s admission.

Difficulties remain for supporting the population where a formal diagnosis may not be given, or indeed obvious. Not having face-to-face contact with wards means that some people may have missed out on the learning disability offering. For me capturing those that may not have had additional support prior to admission is a key target of mine, as often these are the members of the population that may benefit most for the liaison role.

How have you been working differently and are there any positives to take away from the pandemic situation?  

There have been different ways of working which for me have worked well. Again, this is with being able to support other teams, not just within the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) remit but also with the Clinical Commissioning Group and safeguarding teams.

I have particularly enjoyed reminding myself of the skills I once had i.e. with being the expert professional with Care and Treatment Reviews and with clinical interventions such as depot injections.

For me the Covid-19 outbreak has had many silver linings which has been reinforced by the community spirit and the supportive networks on offer.

What would you say to someone considering a career in nursing?

This is a fast paced career that has many ups and downs, but knowing you have supported someone when they are at their most vulnerable is an immeasurable feeling that cannot be recreated in any other career.

Have you considered nursing as a career? If you would like to find out more about working for Nottinghamshire Healthcare visit: www.nottinghamshirehealthcare.nhs.uk/workingforus