I’ve had a right old week of it – in a good way of course!  I actually started the week trying to be sensible. It’s a bit weird really, I usually do things based on gut instinct but I thought I’d try to be a bit grown up and keep all my options open.  I’ve been seriously considering the future of my nursing career (like a grown-up) and had already arranged a lengthy call with Recruitment Panda who, to be honest, have been my rock while I’ve been going through my mid- career crisis.  Trying to be sensible and not wanting to have all my eggs in one basket, I also arranged another call with a different recruitment agency that we met at the job fair as well, mainly to convince my mother that the blisters on her feet weren’t for nothing! I won’t lie. The call with the other agency was a bit scary. The woman with the deep raspy voice fired questions at me so quickly that I almost expected a buzzer to go off and for her to announce how many questions I’d got ri...

I’ve been thinking long and hard recently about where I’m going with my nursing career.  Working with the students over the past couple of weeks has made me feel that I can’t afford to let time pass me by – at this rate one of those students will fly past me on the career ladder and end up telling me what to do!  At the moment, I don’t even have a mentorship certificate to my name, never mind anything else, so it’s time I grew some stones and got a grip.  I need direction. Training and development isn’t going to happen if I stay as a bank and agency nurse with temporary gigs, and I’m fast outgrowing the feeling of being a newly qualified nurse. At this rate, I will be a stale nurse with stale skills – a wannabe turning in to a has-been.  But the more I think about it, the less confident I become. I need someone to convince me that I can actually do this, that there is a role out there for me that isn’t just filling gaps when permanent staff can’t be...