Student nurses have it tough at the best of times, but throw a global pandemic into the mix and suddenly it makes it ten times harder.
Izzy, 19, is a second-year student nurse who has only ever known nursing during a pandemic. She was thrown in at the deep end. With the first placement that she was sent on was a major surgical trauma ward.
In terms of hours on placement, Izzy clarified, “so the NMC requirement is 2300 hours across 3 years” and that the hours are “all unpaid yeah, and you have to pay to get to there”. But she is still expected to work to the same standard that qualified nurses, who are paid a wage do. Izzy also emphasised how with hospitals being so understaffed, they as student nurses were making up the staffing numbers. As a result, they were not being supported by the qualified nurses as they should have been and were expected to know how to do things that were beyond the training that they had received.
Izzy herself, being a student who stayed at home to study, has been lucky that she can drive, making it easier to get to her placements. She said, “nobody gets a placement that is close to them”, travel is an essential part of being a student nurse. She was a lot more fortunate than many of her peers, as she has been able to drive to all of her placements so far. Whereas “some people have to pay for hotels” for the duration of their 8-week placements due to the hospital they were working in being so far away. These expenses are not covered by the placement or the university, it has to be paid for out of your own pocket. In Izzy’s case, “you have to pay for all your petrol, everything. Parking, you don’t get any parking” or she had to risk leaving her car on dodgy side streets for the duration of 12 and a half hour nightshifts. As students, they are also paying to for their university course.
Death is a sensitive subject, yet Izzy revealed the sad truth that as a student nurse, you become quickly desensitised to it. She said “once the first ones done, I know it’s an insensitive thing to say, it’s just the same then”. This is how tough you have to be as a nurse, and how something as emotional as death is expected to be dealt with in a very simplistic way.
Being a student nurse in a pandemic is more isolating than people think according to Izzy. Especially in her case, having not moved out into halls, her entire life for the first year of University revolved around going to placement, going to work and sleeping. Placement takes a lot of you according to Izzy, “on your days off, all you want to do is sleep”. She said “Nightshifts turn you nocturnal” which would never be good for a healthy work life balance even in a world where the country isn’t in lockdown.
One of the most powerful things Izzy said was “it was horrible. I can’t even remember most of my first placement because I was doing mostly nightshifts and it was this new environment, I had no idea what was going on” when I asked if she found it overwhelming when thinking about the fact she was starting her very first nursing placement in the middle of a pandemic. So many of us could never imagine feeling this overwhelmed by something that we have worked so hard to achieve and it shows the sheer resilience that student nurses have had to retain in the last 2 years.
Despite these things, which haven’t made for the best university experience so far, Izzy said, that in regards to choosing to study nursing and starting in a pandemic that she definitely doesn’t regret it. She said, “I’ve always wanted to be a nurse, so it wasn’t going to put me off. If anything, it makes you want to do it more”. Seeing people so vulnerable and in need of care has intensified her want to pursue nursing. Despite the challenges she has faced as a student, Izzy still believes it is the career that she wants to pursue.
