Working as a Clinical Nurse Specialist with Apollo Home Healthcare
Being part of the Apollo Home Healthcare team is just like being part of an extended family. I have worked as part of multidisciplinary teams for the last 13 years and can honestly say, since starting with Apollo Home Healthcare I have never woke up anxious about the day ahead. (Nurses, you know this feeling!)
My name is Louise Crosby, RSCN, and I joined Apollo Home Healthcare in August 2019 having previously worked in the NHS for many years.
Thinking back to when I joined Apollo, I must admit that leaving my team in the NHS filled me with apprehension. It was the usual uncertain feelings when starting a new role; will the team accept me? Will I be good enough? Will I have the right knowledge? Turns out the team are amazing; I refer to them as my work family now!
A typical day starts at the office where I receive a handover from the Care Consultant who was on-call the night before and check over my emails. ( I’ll be honest, initially the computers were a lot to get used to and don’t even mention the photocopier…! Give me a ventilator any day!)
Once I am all caught up I will check the Nurse Diary which gives me my plan for the day ahead. The Nurse Diary contains all the Nurse planned activity for the weeks ahead such as care plan reviews, risk assesments and training and competencies with our Care Assistants.
Having got my day planned out I will then start to make my way to our service user’s homes.
Quite often my visit will be to complete competencies with our Care Assistants. As a Clinical Nurse Specialist I am required to sign off all competencies for our Care Assistants to enable them to complete clinical tasks with the service user. Competencies give me the opportunity to spend time with the Care Assistants who are out on the frontline; These people are amazing, and they could teach me a thing or two. I feel so proud signing Care Assistants off as fully competent to lead a service user’s care.
As well as completing competencies I might also be required to do some planning and assessing with our service users whilst I am in their homes. As a Nurse overseeing our packages of care I do all of these assessments so that we can put effective care plans in place. Then I will also do any care plan reviews as they are needed.
When I am not in a service user’s home I am transcribing MAR Charts, reviewing clinical paperwork and even delivering classroom based training to our Care Assistants. So you can see why no two days are the same!
We laugh a lot in the office, and with our service users and care teams and the support from my seniors is like nothing I’ve known. Visiting service users in their homes means I get to meet some amazing people and their families. I have one lady with MND who loves nothing more than us having a cup of tea together and putting the world to rights. Another service user with a tracheostomy and ventilator loves to criticise my choice of clothing and accessories, “Pearls Louise… ? Really? They’re for the Queen!”
I’ve transitioned from an NHS Nurse to an Apollo Home Healthcare Nurse and I would not change it for anything.
