To celebrate international nurses day we spoke to Ram, charge nurse in major trauma, to hear about their journey to CUH.
Tell us a bit about your CUH journey – your background, when did you join, what positions have you held here?
I have been a staff nurse since 1990 and registered with the NMC in 2004.
I joined the preoperative services at CUH in March 2005 as a band 5 scrub practitioner, a role which I have been doing for more than 10 years prior to my journey in CUH. I settled in my role and theatre team very quickly and within 2 years I was successfully promoted to band 6 which was quite an achievement leaving the favourites behind at the interview and pleasantly surprised all the panellist.
Within six years in trauma and orthopaedics I was appointed as the charge nurse in 2012 for the new major trauma theatre in line with CUH being a major trauma centre.
In this new role I helped to structure the service and implementation of Trauma care pathway/ preparedness for theatre. In order to benchmark our service I visited an established MTC in London to understand their process and advice in the setting up of our services .
In addition on a regular basis I act as the theatre co-ordinator where I manage, lead and support the practitioners across the 37 theatres in the perioperative services. It provides me with the visibility and authoritative presence which I use to ensure the wider team upholding Trust values, right staffing level/skill mix per theatre as per AFPP and above all improve the patient flow and care quality of both elective and emergency care pathway.
How does your role benefit patients?
Effective workforce planning ensures appropriate levels of staff are available to deliver safe, high quality care to patients and service users. The operational performance is a key indicator of how we successfully manage the elective and trauma list.
Our aim is start on time, minimise turn around delays, improve efficiency and utilisation thus avoid on the day cancellations.
To achieve this the planning is done well ahead of time where the list is reviewed at the booking meeting. Accordingly the staffing, skill-mix/support, any specific requirements are allocated to ensure smooth run of the list.
The patients to be provided with the highest standards of care and expectations for a planned journey as you would expect on a first class flight.
My mantra is to focus on the solution rather than the problem.
What are you most proud of?
The area in which I am most proud is our team. We have an extremely good retention rate, due to having a highly engaged team which is also evidenced by our low sickness record. Team dynamics ensures cross cover whenever we have a shortfall. Our multi skilled team can provide all disciplines for the major trauma provision, as required, including the anaesthetic practitioner, and also go on to provide additional theatre support for the fix and flap service that the MTC provides. Our team embrace the Trusts values and abide by our local policies and high commitment. We are also extremely proud of our MTC, which has expanded beyond recognition, since its inception in 2012.