Setting: Residential care home with nursing.
Overview of current role
I'm a deputy manager of a team of nurses and carers in providing quality care for all of the residents. Some of my responsibilities include:
- Ensuring all assessments are completed in a timely fashion from deprivation of liberty assessments to continuing healthcare and fast track.
- Complete audits to ensure legislation is met and the home complies with CQC recommendations.
- Liaise with residents and their families to ensure that they are as involved in the care as they wish to be.
- Support the homes registered manager ensuring the home runs effectively and that standards of care and training needs are met.
I'm also the Chair of integrated care system joint decision making councils for social care.
Qualifications and education
Training, knowledge and skills
- complex care and multiple co-morbidities
- person centered approach with excellent communications skills including verbal/non-verbal
- managing and leading a team
- facilitating clinical supervision
- an understanding of the nursing process in social care settings
- supervision and mentor training
- Florence Nightingale Social Care Nursing Advisory Board Leadership programme
- clinical supervision course
- conflict resolution training
- clinical leadership programme
- co-consulting
- root cause analysis training.
How did I get here
I was in the British Army for 23 years with eight of these being in nursing. I left the Army in 2010 and worked for a private hospital in Leeds for four years before leaving to be a practice nurse specialising in diabetes.
I left to work for another private hospital before leaving after a motorbike accident where I moved (reluctantly) into a nursing home in Scarborough which was originally supposed to be a stepping stone until a suitable post in the NHS became available.
I went on as a registered nurse in the home before eventually being promoted to clinical lead and now to deputy manager for the nursing home but also helping to oversee the clinical concerns across the group.
Although a reluctant starter to social care I have developed a passion to remain in social care to try to encourage that people are offered the opportunity to be cared for with dignity and respect at the end of their lives.