The Chief Executive of the South Eastern Trust Roisin Coulter is a nurse. A volunteer from the age of six with the charity St John Ambulance, Roisin’s career path was evident from an early stage.
Roisin reflected how a, “45 minutes of work experience in a classroom on a Monday morning taught me this was not the career path for me! I was delighted to secure a place at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.”
With International Nurses Day celebrated around the world every May 12th, the anniversary of Florence Nightingale’s birth, Roisin added, “In my heart I am a nurse.” “It is really important to have that professional credibility and the ability to understand what our staff need from the management team in the South Eastern Trust and to work to make things better for our patients. I have had a fantastic, rewarding career in nursing that has led me through many, many roles including the one that I am in today.”
Speaking as part of the International Day of the Nurse and Midwife 2024 conference at Ards Hospital, Director of Nursing, Patient Experience and Allied Health Professional’s, Dr David Robinson’s revealed he initially wanted to be a mechanical engineer but he changed his mind when he did some voluntary work in a local hospital and he decided, “That is the career for me! I knew I always wanted to care for people and make a difference. My speciality during my nursing career was in cancer care and for years I worked as a nurse. For me it’s ‘once a nurse – always a nurse’, it just forms such a part of your identity of who you are.”
Ulster Hospital Cancer Nurse Amy Green described how she wanted to be a nurse from when she was a child. “I had a personal experience with my grandmother as she had cancer when I was a teenager. Coming up and down to the City Hospital’s Bridgewater Suite and working with Marie Curie nurses really inspired me and that really gave me the go ahead to push on and apply for nursing,” said Amy.
Director of Primary Care and Older People Services Clare-Marie Dickson recalled how she wanted to become a nurse from the age of seven “I was in Belfast’s City Hospital for a month and that was my watershed moment of what I wanted to do. “Being a nurse has shaped my life.” Clare-Marie described her nursing vocation as a “privilege.” “There is such diversity in what you can do throughout nursing. I spent five years as a Community Children’s Nurse looking after sick children in their homes and with their families. Managing their care has been life changing for me.”
With nursing spanning two generations in her family, Theatre Nurse Meghan Hamilton decided it was the path she wanted to follow. “Seeing how successful and well my family did in their nursing career I also wanted to become a nurse myself.”
“I have always wanted to be a nurse since I was a little girl following in my mother’s footsteps and really quite simply I wanted to care for people look after people,” added Director of Surgery, Elective, Maternity and Paediatrics Maggie Parks.
The profession of nursing is ingrained in the Trust’s Director of Planning, Performance and Informatics’ Helen Moore. “Right down the middle of me, in my DNA, I’m always a nurse.” “Whenever I was at school I had been ill myself and had some illness in my family. I realised the difference that people, nurses make who are beside you, when you are in hospital. It was that which really inspired me to go into nursing, just that difference it can make to people’s lives.”