Tomorrow I’m going to go to work with my tin hat on. I might even go all out and put my suit of armour on after the day I’ve had today. I was at Sunshine Nursing Home, the home I consider to be my second home after doing so many shifts there. Charisma at the nursing agency asked me if I could do a few extra shifts in the run up to Christmas and I thought it would be a doddle. How wrong was I!? When I arrived for my shift there was a whole new batch of carers who I hadn’t worked with before. Apparently, a new home has opened down the road and in a grand indictment of the state of staff retention in nursing and care work, there had been a mass exodus of the care staff, including my mate Rita who has been appointed as the new senior carer. I won’t lie, I was a bit miffed to find she had gone and not invited me to her leaving do….I’ve had loads of practice with beer pong and I do a seriously mean Beyonce on the karaoke…maybe she didn’t rate me as much as I thought she did. ...

I don’t know what’s up with me these days. Can hormones make you assertive? When I think back to six months ago when I had just qualified as a nurse and first went to Sunshine Retirement Village as an agency nurse, I wouldn’t argue with anyone. I’m even a bit ashamed to say that I probably didn’t stand up for my nursing residents very well, when some of them only had me to speak up for them. But I’m not like that now. I think I’m positively bossy but I like to think that I do that because I have learnt so much about the residents and I know that if I don’t speak up then they might not get what they need. Take today for example. I’d forgotten we had a massive safeguarding meeting being held at the home. Apparently, a social worker had reported the home for mismanagement of a pressure ulcer and the lady resident had been taken to hospital and had her foot amputated, poor lady.  The safeguarding had come out of nowhere. We had every professional input into that wound ...