Nurses and support workers

Harriet Burrows, a band 6 charge nurse on a female inpatient mental health ward in Leeds, tells us her story so far.

I studied mental health nursing in Leeds and was able to do my placements at the Trust which I really enjoyed. I thought the way staff worked with service users was fantastic and they were really supportive to me too. They were continually pushing me to develop. As a student you can sometimes avoid the scary things but staff here always pushed me to get full range of experience.

When I qualified I went to work in Bradford in the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). This is kind of like the mental health equivalent of A&E. It’s fast paced, high pressure but it stood me in good stead because you have to think on your feet and apply yourself creatively. For example, we did a lot of work to de-escalate difficult situations without getting ‘hands on’ with very challenging patients. It’s something I’ve been able to apply in my role here and my time in the PICU has helped me progress quickly.

I was able to get a job with the Trust as a band 5 staff nurse in November 2015, and moved up to a band 6 charge nurse working with female inpatients in the following February.

My role now still involves a lot of the clinical responsibilities, like developing care plans and conducting risk assessments, but there’s also a lot of communication. For example, one to one time with the service users to assess their needs, speaking with other professionals to get opinions and create a full care picture of a person, speaking to partner agencies to arrange a person’s discharge from hospital, and of course, speaking to relatives, friends and carers who are so crucial in supporting a person on their recovery.

As well as the clinical side of things, as a charge nurse you are there to support your colleagues and ensure they get proper clinical supervision. I think that’s something we do really well here. Part of my role is to support nurses to implement changes to our practice such as the introduction of the Purposeful Inpatient Admission model, or PIPA. The aim of PIPA is to improve efficiency of an inpatient admission and get people out of hospital quickly, removing barriers to discharge like sorting out any housing problems or safeguarding issues.

At the end of the day, nobody wants to be in hospital for a long time. I see how it can debilitate people and take their skills away, so working to discharge someone as soon as they are ready is so important.

It feels like we’ve got a really supportive team at LYPFT. And people really push you to develop – it’s not something that you get in every trust.

Working for LYPFT has enabled me to gain valuable knowledge and skills which will help me to further my career. The Trust recognises and rewards hard work and is always supportive of staff development, offering opportunities to participate in further learning.

The care afforded to our service users is excellent and we are always looking for ways to improve the quality of care that we provide. You see staff going above and beyond for patients every day. It makes you feel you are working in an environment which is doing the best it can for people.

In this video you’ll hear from Lucy, a Health Support Worker in our Memory Services. Lucy won an award from our Trust for her dedicated work with people living with dementia.