What does your role involve?
As a senior nurse, my role is focused on improving elective surgery care in Women’s Health, and implementing the latest evidence, guidelines, and policies. I manage the Women’s Health Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) team, which provides perioperative nursing services to gynaecology and breast patients having planned surgery. Perioperative care starts when the possibility of surgery is first discussed with a patient and ends when they have recovered after surgery at home.
What is a typical day for you?
I have a nice mix of strategic, operational, clinical, and educational work.
Strategically, I lead the development of a new pre-operative patient education group called Surgery School. I also work with surgical colleagues across UCLH on a national improvement initiative to support patients to drink, eat and mobilise out of bed within the first 24 hours after surgery.
Operationally, I work to improve inpatient flow for Women’s Health patients, reducing avoidable delays, emergency re-admissions, and improve patient experience.
Clinically, I work to keep patients as informed as possible. Preparing for surgery and recovery is a partnership between a patient and their healthcare team. When our patients know what they can do to improve their recovery after surgery, it helps to reduce anxiety, complications and the time spent in hospital.
We recently launched a post-discharge telephone advice line so patients can speak to a surgical nurse specialist for recovery advice up to two weeks after discharge. Our patients have found this reassuring, and many have said this service has saved them from attending their GP surgery or the Emergency Department.
What skills do you need for your role?
You need to have a questioning approach and work as part of a team to find answers. It’s important to network with other teams, locally and nationally, and be willing to share your ideas and be comfortable using data to back them up.
It’s important to remember that not every change will work as expected, but not to be scared to fail and to always share your results, even if they aren’t what you were hoping for.
What has been your proudest moment?
My proudest moment recently was chairing my first co-production group. It felt like a groundbreaking event for me because, traditionally, we make changes to services and then seek patient feedback. This time, we involved patients in the design process from the beginning, making them integral members of the team.
Since 2018, I’ve been dedicated to providing women’s health education through our Surgery School group, and I’m also proud to have contributed to developing international consensus guidelines based on our learning at UCLH.
What are you most looking forward to over the next year?
I look forward to continuing to develop an interactive and accessible perioperative nursing service for UCLH patients.