Working as a Clinical Nurse Specialist with Apollo Home Healthcare
At the end of each working day my husband asks me how my day has been and I never respond with ‘same as always’ because each day is totally different to another. And this pretty much sums up life as a Clinical Nurse Specialist with Apollo Home Healthcare!
My name is Marie Knight and I qualified as a Nurse in the eighties. I have spent some of my career in the USA and more recently I worked for Nutricia as an Enteral Feed Specialist . I then joined Apollo Home Healthcare as a Clinical Nurse Specialist in the North West office.
As a Clinical Nurse Specialist, my time is divided between being in our office based in Heywood, and being out and about in our service user’s homes.
There is no set routine that would usually make your day hum drum. Each day evolves with priorities changing making you stop one thing, start another then go back to the start!
I will usually start my day in the office on my emails, which will often contain requests for various tasks to be done as well as any tasks that may have come in overnight from our Care Consultant on call, needing the support of a Nurse.
I have a core set of responsibilities to do on a day to day, week to week or month to month basis which include things like MAR transcription, monthly logs, care planning and completing competencies and training sessions with our Care Assistants. All of this is laid out in our Nurse Diary which gives me my plan for each day.
There may be days when time spent in the office is limited with priority leaning towards service user visits. This allows me to get out into the community visiting our service user’s homes and getting to meet some wonderful people as a result.
Whilst I am in the service user’s home I may be doing an assessment which can only be done by a Nurse and allows us to produce each service user’s person-centred care plan. I may also be doing a review of the service user’s care plan which also takes place in their home.
As well as spending time with the service users, part of doing home visits is also to complete competencies with our Care Assistants. This is where I assess specific clinical tasks and sign the Care Assistant off as being competent to manage each task.
In between all of this I might take a phone call from a service user, their family or their Care Assistants when they want to speak to a Nurse, which could result in you providing reassurance, making further calls such as to GP or another healthcare professional or discussing further with the team before calling back.
All this is done with a team of people that are not just your colleagues but your ‘work family’. There is someone there to support you when you need it and give a shoulder to lean on. They are there when you feel overwhelmed and will make you laugh when the moment allows.
Being a Clinical Nurse Specialist with Apollo allows you to be yourself, to not be restricted to a box but being able to think and action things outside the box, to have a sense of achievement every day no matter how small it may be and doing it all with a bunch of people you feel at home with, after all, they are your work family.
