Today is Connors story a nurse who has returned to nursing following a break. He works on one of our Acute Admission Mental Health Wards in Dorset HealthCare.
I'm not a great fan of social media but if I have one thing to thank Twitter for it's getting me back to being a nurse.
The story (please let's not call it a journey) begins with my wife showing me a tweet from @bournemouthuni about a programme for ex-nurses wanting to return to the register.
There’s thankfully no room here for the tedium of a complete autobiography, but in brief I’d set up as a freelance trainer in 1998. I worked as a part-time community nurse while the business got established before taking the scary step toward complete self-employment some 10 years before filling in that application for Return to Practice
Being your own boss has many things to recommend it, but I couldn’t now go back to my life of motorways, hotels and fiddling with digital projectors that don’t work. So thanks to some ‘back to school’ time, a very enjoyable ward placement at Melstock House and some hasty re-writing of a not very good assignment, I eventually got the email from the NMC telling me I was back on the register again.
That was a good email.
Of course I’d forgotten a lot about what I enjoyed about the work. I’d forgotten about what wasn’t so enjoyable. I was surprised by how much I still knew, how much my colleagues valued my experience, and how little had actually changed since I’d been away. There’s many more hours spent staring at screens.
Patients get nasty messages from Facebook, not television or radio. But people still get very unwell and need skilled help from the likes of myself and my colleagues. That hasn’t changed one bit.
We are so glad you came back to nursing Connor.