Back to Practice with Covid-19

Beginning to lose a bit of will with this process. I obviously will not be starting back anywhere this week and today hits the six week mark in my attempt to return. It has got such that I have been thinking of pulling out entirely and joining the volunteer NHS effort and offer some support that way. I have had a couple of phone calls this week from an NHS recruitment worker with the suggestion that I might consider a start as a staff nurse with a local district nurse team in north Edinburgh. I am happy to do this with the support of the DN team but would still need some basic stuff to get started such as some uniforms. I await further contact with more information. I continue to progress with some hope but it is diminishing.

Been back online doing yet more Fire Safety, Manual Handling, Medicines Management, Deteriorating Patients (recognising and preventing rather than aiding and abetting) and a few others. Still a few to get through though. Soon I’ll have spent the best part of a week online applying, documenting, monitoring, recording and training. One day it will lead to some real face to face work – hopefully. One thing I have been reminded of is that the NHS does like an acronym and a mnemonic. So far I have come across or been reacquainted with TRAK, NEWS2, GCS, AVPU, SBAR-D and the Sepsis 6 (good game for a boy band I know…).  All useful, important and helpful once you know what they mean or how they work. I communicated with a nursing colleague who has also offered to return to clinical practice after many years elsewhere. They felt that the service really had no idea what to do with them or where to put them. It seems that some ...

Yet more more progress today. Following my trip to the Western General Hospital I now have a new NHS Lothian ID card. I am now badged as a Covid-19 Staff Nurse. As usual the actual phot o is a bit crap. The role however s ounds ominously specific. Still hoping I can get away with the NHS Scotland online mandatory modules but I’ll probably work my way through the NHS Lothian ones as well over the weekend. May well also need to have a good look at a few of the more clinically focused modules as it is increasingly like ly that I will be heading in that direction . Having spoken with a former colleague I believe they are under significant pressure to second staff to other more acute clinical areas. I a lso spoke with someone from the NHS recruitment process who asked whether , given my background and experience, I would consider working in either a community hospital or as part of a district nursing home care team. I’d be interested and happy with either but may be of m...

Clarity on st at us today and links made to get online as an NHS Lothian employee. Good stuff. Good quick response s to m y queries of yesterday. I am to be offered a fixed term contract which is fine. I was also given the necessary details to log back in to the NHS Lothian intranet. I n order to be granted access I was asked to either give a range of details that I didn’t have about my future job title, line manger, working location etc or admit that I was the John Boyce still on their system as a former Clinical Nurse Manager and bank Health Visitor! Needless to say I opted for the latter. The downside of having renewed NHS Lothian intranet access exposed my lamentable failure to complete any of NHS Lothian's previously inaccessible online mandatory training modules, many of which overlap extremely closely with the NHS Scotland ones that I have completed. Hopefully my record of completion of these will suffice but if it doesn’t I will also complete the NHS Lothian o...

Two emails from NHS Scotland today one inviting me to attend the Western General Hospital on Friday for ID verification, an ID badge and, hopefully, setting me up with IT access. The other frustratingly asked me to complete the Disclosure Scotland PVG check system, again. I have declined this request and sent a copy of the PVG Certificate I received from Disclosure Scotland a few days ago as a result of already going through this process. I have also been given links to further local NHS Lothian core online training which I hope will mostly be covered by those that I have already undertaken for NHS Scotland. But if not I will repeat some of it again if necessary. I am also trying to work out if I am to return to work via a fixed term contract or by bank shift work as each route has different people to contact to take this forward. I am aware of discussing these options over the course of the phone interview I had a few weeks ago and think th...

Okay, entering week five of my endeavour to return to practice and the NHS. So far I have completed and submitted a formal application to return, re-registered with the Nursing & Midwifery Council, had a 30 minute telephone interview, undertaken all core online reintroduction to nursing modules and a fair few more besides, and been fully vetted by Disclosure Scotland. However onboarding appears not yet to be complete. I’m not sure what is next but hopefully it will include some guide as to where I may be allocated or asked to work.

Whilst in the process of onboarding I have kept busy allotmenteering and infertilising our loam landings with preplantlings in hope of a plusreap of futurity rewards of fullbounteous plenty and a posnucopea of herbivourous fruitage. And it has been lovely and warm and sunny. B ut still no news of returning to a role in the NHS.

Dear Lord don’t you just love the neologisms of management speak. This weekend I received a holding email from NHS Scotland quite legitimately outlining aspects of the complex process already and yet to be undertaken t o place returning candidates in to suitable post s based on location, skills and experience. However they call this an onboarding process which is a most atrocious and unnecessary mauling of language. Surely the perfectly reasonable, regularly used and well understood term, recruitment could have been used instead? I have always understood I was part of a rushed, accelerated recruitment process. But in f act I am being onboarded (ah, the spell checker doesn’t like it either!) . Happy Easter.

Well no sign yet of getting back to work. Still awaiting confirmation that I am re-employed by NHS Lothian so that I can sort out an area of work to get back into. Or have that done on my behalf if necessary. Have spent the week undertaking a range of other optional online courses, mostly to do with infection prevention and control, otherwise known as the Scottish Infection Prevention and Control Education Pathway. Modules completed include: Why infection prevention and control matters Breaking the chain of infection Respiratory and cough hygiene Blood and body fluid spillages Patient placement / assessment for infection risk Safe management of care equipment Safe management of care environment Prevention and management of occupational exposure Safe management of linen Safe disposal of waste Infection prevention and control: Clostridium difficile Infection prevention and control: refresher for clinical and non-clinical staff ...

Had hoped to get the remaining five modules completed today in a couple of hours. While I managed three of them in about 45 minutes this morning the remaining two I could not access as I was left staring interminably at the little revolving wheel of death that represents a page refusing to load. Ironically one of these modules is about the management of violence and aggression and it got me feeling quite aggressive towards the system for not allowing me access. I needed to go off to the allotment to de-escalate the situation! Back from the allotment and following advice from a properly qualified iTechnical person, i.e. someone a lot younger than me (thanks again Callum), I have finally completed the last two modules. In the end I needed to use an incognito browser for the first one and the final module would only open on a browser on my phone! Anyway, got there, in the end. So, thirteen modules later, taking just over five hours to com...

Received an email today as part of the accelerated recruitment programme providing me with links to a range of core and optional online modules to support my return to work. So far I have found thirteen mandatory modules which I need to undertake. I will look at the optional modules once I have eventually completed the essential ones. Over the course of just under four hours today I have completed the following eight modules to return to practice: Information governance - safe information handling Equality and diversity Healthcare associated infection - Scottish Infection, Prevention and Control Pathway (SIPCEP) foundation layer Hand Hygene Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Basic life support (Adult and Paediatric) National early warning score (NEWS) used in NHS Scotland The only poor one with limited relevance was on Basic Life Support. This module focussed far too much on quite detailed, hospital-based, A&E focused scenar...

A quiet couple of days. I have been waiting to hear from NHS Lothian that I am back on the payroll and can then access and complete the minimum necessary online induction packages. This evening I got a formal job offer, necessarily a little non-specific currently, with a request to return various forms and copies of ID documents within 24hrs. I have done this despite some teething difficulties with the forms and the information requested. One form was oddly formatted for sensible completion but it is now done. The request for further information was also a little opaque but I think I fathomed it eventually. The tasks took some one and a half hours to complete and return the requested information. Next should be a second email with online links to further forms and access to induction information. Hopefully I might get access to complete this over the wee...

I continue to wait for the accelerated recruitment process to work through due process. This will take a wee bit time. This is a large undertaking to get many hundreds of staff back in employment in NHS Lothian over a very short timescale. The scale of the task is huge. My thanks go to all current staff working flat out to make this happen. Meanwhile, on a parallel track I have been in contact with my former area of work and it looks like there may be a particular job to be done in an area of necessary continuing healthcare. The area is that of routine childhood immunisations. This area of service has undergone a change in its delivery model and there appear to be some issues with how it is being delivered. No doubt some of this will be down to the current high levels of staff sickness, redeployment and the social distancing measures enacted as a result of Covid-19. But the health service still needs to ensure that all f...