A Day in My Life
Engagement und Kompetenz: Lernen Sie eine Krankenschwester kennen, die in einer Abteilung für Wirbelsäulenverletzungen arbeitet.
Meet an Australian nurse
Hello! My name is Emmily Cox. I am a 35-year-old nurse, and I work at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Australia. I am married with three children, aged 16, 14, and my youngest is nine. I am a shift worker, currently active on the spinal injuries unit at the hospital, which means I can be rostered on to a variety of different shifts. My work is very unpredictable, and I find out when my shifts occur only a few weeks in advance.
When I’m on night duty, my day will start first thing in the morning, at about six o’clock, with getting my children up and ready for school. This involves trying to get them out of bed, which can be quite difficult some days. But when I’m getting their breakfast, they’ll be making their lunches. Once I finish nagging them to hurry up and get ready for school, we try to leave at about 7.45 a.m.
Even though their school is actually about 10 minutes up the road, due to traffic, I have to allow about half an hour to get them there. Once I’ve dropped them off, I head home and get some housework done. I also prepare dinner for my husband and children for the same evening.
It takes me about 45 minutes to get to work, but because I have to allow time for parking — as it’s such a big hospital — I actually leave at ten past one. My shift starts at 2.30.
Once I get to the ward, I go to the staff room and put my bags down. I always allow some time for a coffee. Then I walk out to the nurses’ station and look at the allocations for the day to see which area I’ll be working in. Once I know that, I grab my handover sheet and head off to the area where the nurses are always waiting to hand over their shift. After we’ve done our bedside handover — walking from bed to bed, giving the handover and introducing ourselves to the patients — we have a look at our shift planner. We work out our shift according to our patients’ needs and which staff are skilled enough to look after those patients.
In the spinal unit, most of our injuries are after car and motorbike accidents. Some of them can also be due to skiing accidents. Generally, these happen overseas, so patients get flown back to the Princess Alexandra Hospital for surgery and then move on to our ward, which is rehab. They’re here to work out ways to improve their quality of life, to get back home and back to work.
Our ward is actually very specialized in the sense that it’s the only one for spinal injuries in Queensland. So we have a very big array of patients who come down from up north to all over Brisbane, to Logan, or from the Gold Coast. Some people who come up to us are from just over the border in New South Wales. All this can be really hard psychologically for our patients. They’re dealing not only with their injury, but also with being away from their families and friends back home.
Once we’ve done all this, we have a quick clean-up of the ward before the next staff get on for their shift. When they arrive, we’ll do a handover with them, and afterwards, I’ll go and get my bag and head home for the day.
I generally finish work at seven o’clock. I walk to my car, and I am really happy to get home. Due to traffic, I will get home anywhere between 8 and 8.30. The first thing I love to do is get in and have a nice hot shower. Once I’ve done that, I’ll come out and have some breakfast. Some days, I don’t know whether I’m going to have breakfast, lunch or dinner, but that’s just how it works when you’re a shift worker.
I have some breakfast and try to wind down by just watching a bit of TV or listening to music before I hop into bed. Then my day actually involves sleeping the time away and getting ready to do it all over again that night.