Job Description

Adult Nursing Children’s Nursing Mental Health Nursing Learning Disability Nursing Midwifery Health Visiting

Adult Nursing
Adult nurses are primarily concerned with nursing sick and injured adults back to health in both hospital and community settings.

The focus of attention for a qualified nurse is the patient: not simply the condition from which he or she may be suffering, but the needs and anxieties which it may generate... including the pressures on family and friends. The mark of the professional is the ability to observe and assess what is happening with a patient at any one time and to select the most effective response.

Your place of work may be a hospital ward or specialist clinic, or it could be out in the community - visiting people at home or attached to local health centres. Nurses are playing an increasingly prominent role in the provision of health care in the community. At the same time, other nurses are at the forefront in very specialist areas such as intensive care, theatre and recovery, cancer care and care of the elderly. What makes adult nursing such a challenge is the sheer diversity of situations you will have to respond to. You will be working with people who have acute and long-term illnesses. Many will be elderly, others will be younger people with chronic and acute illnesses and injuries.

As a nurse you need to know what to do, and you need to know why you're doing it. You will be part of a multi-disciplinary team that includes doctors, physiotherapists, anaesthetists, pharmacists, dietitians and many more. So you also need to know how all these different people interact.

The challenges of adult nursing are many and varied. You will need the presence of mind to juggle priorities among very different and constantly changing needs of patients. You will be the most frequent point of contact for patients, so you must be able to answer their questions and make sure their needs are recognised by the rest of the care team. You have to be constantly alert to changes in patients' conditions and the implications in terms of care. It's a demanding job with serious responsibility. In return, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you make a real difference in reducing suffering and promoting the health of people in your care.

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Children’s Nursing
Children's nurses care for sick children and provide support to their families.

Children's nursing can take you from intensive care of a new-born baby with breathing problems to looking after a six-foot-tall adolescent whose leg has been broken in a soccer match.

The reason you're there as a children's nurse is because children are not just mini-adults: their bodies (and minds) work in different ways. The onset of symptoms can be sudden and extreme. Because children are still growing, the impact of the illness or injury on their development has to be taken into account. And because they are young, they may be more scared or confused by what is happening to them. That's why they need nurses who understand their particular needs.

Children have parents and brothers and sisters who are all involved in different ways. Children's nurses work closely with patients' families as part of the caring process. One of the most striking features of children's nursing is how often you share your nursing skills with others: the child's parents or whoever would normally look after them at home. Your job is to give the child's carers the confidence and ability to carry on with their caring role, knowing when to stand back and when to take over if necessary. It requires a special set of attitudes and open-mindedness to people's different ways of relating to their children.

Children's nursing can sometimes involve managing distress. A rich mix of emotions often surrounds child illness such as panic, anxiety, anger, powerlessness, guilt. You'll play a key part in helping families come through their crises.

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Mental Health Nursing
Mental Health Nurses care for people with mental health problems in hospitals and in the community, helping patients to overcome their ill health, or to come to terms with it, so they can lead as normal a life as possible.

As a society we find it much easier to talk about being physically unwell than about mental health problems. In part, this is due to the impossibility of drawing a clear dividing line between mental health and illness. At any one time, one adult in six suffers from one or other form of mental illness. In other words mental illnesses are as common as asthma. Everyone has episodes of depression, anger, stress and fear throughout their lives, but when do we need care and professional support?

Mental health nurses are at the front line in providing that support - working with GPs, psychiatrists, social workers and others to co-ordinate care. In recent years, there has been a significant shift from hospitals to the community as the setting for mental health care. Nurses work in people's homes, in small residential units, and in local health centres with considerable autonomy in how they plan and deliver care. At the same time, they are key players in a multi-agency team. The one-to-one personal relationships that mental health nurses form with people are at the heart of the care process.

The key challenge for you as a mental health nurse is to use your specialist skills, and personal strengths, to help people come to terms with their problems. The important factors in this therapeutic relationship are the ability to listen and draw information out, and then to help people find a means of coping with their problems. Involving family, friends and other contacts will often be part of your role.

Another challenge is to identify if and when a person may be at risk of harming themselves or others; so one of the skills you'll learn is spotting the build-up of tension and ways of defusing it. Mental health nurses are also the most likely to be responsible for co-ordinating a patient's care in the community. You'll therefore find yourself liaising professionally with a wide range of other services including social workers, police, charities, local government and housing officials.

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Learning Disability Nursing
Learning Disability Nurses work with people with learning disabilities to help them become as independent as possible.

People with a learning disability can struggle to cope with aspects of everyday, independent living. For most, around 20 in every thousand people, support is only needed at times of crisis. But some, 3 or 4 people in every thousand, require more intensive support. The role of the nurse is to help all people with a learning disability to maintain and improve their lifestyles, and to participate fully as equal members of society. In some instances this may mean helping clients to develop their manual and recognition skills so that they can use kitchen equipment to make a pot of tea. In other cases, you will be underpinning people's efforts to find work and bring up a family - helping them make their way in a world that can sometimes seem difficult and threatening.

The distinctive contribution of learning disability nurses is their concern to influence behaviours and lifestyles that promote health and well-being for individuals and their families and carers. You will be working in a wide variety of settings: people's own homes, their family homes, residential care, schools, workplaces and leisure. As your career unfolds you can maintain this broad spread of activity, or you could choose to specialise in an area such as sensory disability, education, or management of learning disability services.

The main challenge is to remain constantly sensitive and alert in how you relate to people, helped by new technology tools such as sensory stimulation and interactive learning systems. Adaptability and resourcefulness in very varied work settings becomes second nature. As part of a multi-agency team you will sometimes have to be prepared to stand your own ground in the interests of the people you are supporting. Progress can be slow, but small things do mean a great deal. By helping someone speak up for themselves, you are doing more than teaching them how to put their point of view. You are increasing their self-confidence and sense of worth, and enabling them to share more fully in the challenges and pleasures of living.

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Midwifery
Midwives can work in the community, in hospitals or both. Their role goes much further than delivering babies; they're involved in antenatal and postnatal care, in counselling, in offering support and education, and in helping mothers and their partners prepare for parenthood.

Midwives have a client group who are on the whole very healthy, and in need of help and advice only because they are expecting a baby. The birth itself may be at the heart of the process, but midwives provide support to women, their babies, their partners and families, from conception to the first phase of post-natal care.

The role of midwife has changed significantly in recent years to provide a "woman-centred" service that offers greater choice and continuity of support to mother and child. So your work will take you out of the hospital into people's homes and local clinics as part of the overall healthcare team.

Every delivery is a major event in the lives of the people involved. Midwives have the lead professional role in preparing for and managing the event, intervening where necessary and knowing what to do if the mother or baby is sick.

Having babies happens to all sorts of people, so you will be providing professional support and reassurance to a huge diversity of women, during some of the most emotionally-intense periods in their lives. You will have to stay calm and alert in times of stress, and enable women to feel confident and in control. On the rare occasions where something goes wrong, you have to be ready to react quickly and effectively.

As your experience grows you can research and develop special areas of practice, become involved in services such as family planning, or move into teaching or management.

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Health Visitor
Health Visitors are expected to promote health including mental, physical and social wellbeing in the community. They do this by giving practical help and advice to the whole family. Some work from doctors' surgeries while others cover a geographical area, visiting people in their homes and schools. Health visitors work with a large network of other groups concerned with health, sickness, social and educational services.

Most people's idea of what health visitors do is rather hazy. But today the health visitor's role has never been so important. As a key member of the primary healthcare team, it's your job to promote health in your practice area (most health visitors cover the area of a GP's practice). You help well people to stay well, and ill people to come to terms with their illness.

It's a varied role. You could be counselling the previous partners of someone diagnosed HIV positive, paying 'listening visits' to mothers who have post-natal depression, or supporting and advising someone who wants to give up smoking.

Health visitors must be qualified nurses. They then take a degree programme to qualify as a health visitor. Health visitors work in the community. You will be a guest in peoples' homes, offering help and advice, so you need to have the ability to communicate effectively with people of all ages. You have to be a good listener, and be able to pick up on the finer points of non-verbal communication.

You need maturity and some experience of life to help deal with problems like bereavement and child abuse. You should be able to rise to a challenge and to anticipate anything which might affect a client's health - from a broken heater to a lack of basic health knowledge. You work to help people help themselves.

Health visitors have to be good managers. You will have a lot of autonomy, be accountable and responsible for your actions. A strong sense of purpose and self awareness are useful qualities for the job.