My name is Be and I’m a nurse for the Hospice In Your Home (HIYH) service. I worked in community nursing for about 5 years after I qualified and started picking up bank shifts at Nottinghamshire Hospice while working at a local hospital.

Why do you work here?

The more I did the hospice work the more I could feel like this is where my heart is. It fits a lot more with my personal values and how I want to nurse. I don’t want nursing to be a conveyor belt. I don’t want to be surviving a shift thinking “I wish I had more time to support that family”. When you get here you feel like “yes, this is how it should be” and the whole team supports you.

In other places there’s a lot of optional training on having difficult conversations and “offering psychological support for bereavement – but they’re all optional courses. Here, they’re considered core elements of training. They’re things that should be high on everyone’s agendas but in the current climate it ends up that they get sidelined by lots of other organisations.

You can’t look at a patient in isolation when they’re dying. The family are bereaved. It’s wonderful to be able to genuinely give holistic care, and extend that to the family unit and whoever’s important to them as well through our Bereavement and Wellbeing services.

What do you love about your job?

There’s no feeling quite like at the end of the day where you think “I’ve made a difference.”

Sometimes it’s being there for other staff who are having a difficult day, but more often it’s the patients that come to you. How lucky are we to be able to go home every day knowing that the world is maybe a little bit better because you’ve done your job?

I also love what we get from the patients – there’s definitely a two-way giving thing that goes on. Especially in our Wellbeing service where I’m also a Lead Nurse. Patients come in and we give them that little boost of happiness that they need. But when you know that they’re in such tough times, and yet they can still come in and make another patient laugh, it teaches you so much.

When I’m on HIYH shifts, it’s a different feeling. The impact we can have in that moment is massive. We can go and fix things on the spot and share that calm. We can educate the family on what to expect. Things are so different with us being there. By preparing the families we empower them to cope with what’s coming.

We’re currently recruiting for a variety of roles in our Hospice In Your Home service. See our vacancies page for more details.