Nursing and Auxiliary Work
‘Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise do a patient more harm than any exertion’. (Florence Nightingale, nursing pioneer, 1820-1910)
Through their encouraging, cheerful and tactful work, nurses, health care assistants and hospital porters can do a great deal to relieve patients of some of these worries!
In this sector you would work closely with patients.
Nurses care for sick patients in hospital or the community. Midwives care for women and their babies, before and after the baby is born. District nurses visit patients in their homes. Public health nurses advise people on how to prevent illness and remain healthy.
Health care assistants or nursing auxiliaries help nurses look after patients in hospitals, care homes or in their own homes. They are part of a team usually supervised by a nurse. Hospital porters take patients round the hospital, for treatment or investigations.
To work in this sector, you must be reliable, responsible, and enjoy working with people. You should be able to get on with patients, and their relatives, from all ages and backgrounds. You should be able to deal with suffering and perhaps death, and remain calm in an emergency. Most staff work as part of a team, but as a district nurse or a public health nurse you would work alone much of the time.
You do not need qualifications to become a hospital porter.
You could train as a health care assistant through a Modern Apprenticeship and gain a Scottish Vocational Qualification (SVQ) Level 3 in health care. You do not usually need qualifications for this but a good general education is helpful. Or you could take a National Certificate (NC), National Qualification (NQ) or Higher National Certificate (HNC) in health care or social care, at a further education college, before looking for a job.
To become a registered nurse or midwife, you need a Diploma in Higher Education (DipHE) or a degree in your chosen specialism. After qualifying and gaining experience you could train as a district nurse or public health nurse.
All of these jobs are open to both women and men. At present most staff are women but the number of men is increasing. There is a demand for nurses and the number of places on degree and DipHE courses in increasing.
The long-term trend is for more nurses to be employed. Over the past 10 years there has been an increase of about 10%, with 67,965 in post by 30th September 2008. However more nurses now register with agencies and work part-time for different hospitals. In 2007, only 1.7% of new nursing graduates were still looking for a job six months after graduation. (Source: What do graduates do? 2009, AGCAS)
More and more nurses are training to become clinical nurses, which allows them to work more independently and at an advanced level.