March 2025
What is your current role?
I am a children’s nurse and currently work as an advanced nurse practitioner, primarily for the South Thames Retrieval Service, which is based in the paediatric intensive care unit at Evelina London Children’s Hospital. This is a service which takes referrals for sick children in district hospitals around south London and the south east of England, which includes places as far away as Margate and Hastings. Doctors from these hospitals phone us to ask for advice about looking after very sick children. Our role includes giving advice over the phone and travelling by ambulance to collect the children and move them to intensive care units in London to receive specialist care.
Tell us about a typical day
Each day can be different. I might spend all day on the telephone, or I might end up in the back of an ambulance on my way to any hospital in our region. Very occasionally I might travel in a helicopter! The children that we care for range in age from a new born to 16 years old, so in one day I might look after a tiny baby with a heart problem and also a teenager that is bigger than me with seizure or a chest infection. Sometimes my job involves teaching nurses and doctors how to look after sick children when they first come to hospital.
What’s the best thing about your job?
I love the fact that I am travelling around the region, meeting teams from lots of different hospitals, and that there is a huge variety of conditions that we look after. I also really enjoy looking after the families and making sure the children get the care that they need in the right place and at the right time.
What are you most proud of?
One of these things that I am most proud of is that I am one of very few nurses in the world who do this job, and that we are considered leaders and experts in our field. We first started developing this role in 2003, and now we have a team of 15 advanced nurse practitioners who offer a 24 hour a day, 7 days a week service.
What are you working on at the moment?
In my most recent project, I developed an education programme for nurses across all of the hospitals in our region. We wanted to improve the education for nurses to help them identify when children are very sick, and what they need to do to try and make them better. More than 200 nurses have been to our study days and told us that they found them really useful.
Would you recommend your job to other people?
Absolutely! When I started training as a nurse for adults in Australia 30 years ago, I had no idea that I would be looking after sick children on the other side of the world one day! Some of the things that nurses will be doing in the future haven’t even been thought of yet – how exciting is that?
Thank you to the children and young people who have so brilliantly illustrated our blog pages.