5 Questions With Our Nurse Efe

We invited Efe, who has been working with Direct Healthcare for almost 1 year to visit our head office in London and share her nursing story with us over a cup of tea.  

Could you please introduce yourself and how did you get into nursing?

My name is Efe, and I have been an adult community staff nurse for nearly 14 years now. It’s a role that involves going around in the community, visiting patients in their homes.

Back home I was a banker before moving to the UK with my 3 children. I was planning to get back into the finance sector before a friend of mine who was a nurse in the UK said to me “Why don’t you just come into the health service?”. She also mentioned that the training was free (back then). It was between social services and nursing and I chose nursing.

I then registered for university and within 3 months I started the course. I needed something that was family-friendly, and nursing to me then was family-friendly.

While I was doing the first year I was thinking if this is for me because you have to do nights and days. Then when I did my second year, community nursing placement, I knew it was for me, and when I graduated, I went straight into community nursing because I was able to do days only.

In your opinion, what are the most important skills you need to have to make a good nurse?

Well, to be a good nurse first of all you have to care. Then you have to be empathetic, you got to be patient, and then you got to realise that your patient is the most important person at the time, especially when you are providing care.

You also have to be a very good team player because as a nurse we work in a team. You should be able to communicate effectively, with effective communication either with a patient, with health professionals, or with your team you make sure that the patient has the quality of care, and that quality of care is also high.

What do you consider as the biggest challenges at your job?

The biggest challenge at my job I would say is having a patient who is not cooperating with you.

So that can make things difficult for you, or when you have a team member who just isn’t a team player. But I think if you love your profession it doesn’t matter. When the challenges come, you just cross them.

Could you tell us why did you join Direct Healthcare and how is your experience going so far?

I have known my two consultants from before, and they had a good reputation for my standard as a consultant. They then contacted me and told me that a certain contract was on, and they have asked me if I would be interested, and I was interested.

I knew many different consultants before starting to work with these two, but I haven’t met any consultants like them.

When they talked about Direct Healthcare, I knew that it must be a very good company, for them to be working with Direct Healthcare, and I also knew there must be a very good contract for them to be calling me, there must be something that I would be interested in. And very simply, that is how I joined. 

Anything I call them about, they sort it, which is what I would expect my consultant would do. 

In a lot of agencies, you have consultants who are just there for the money, but you have consultants who are actually making sure they build the relationship with every single nurse, and that is what I was looking for. 

Do you have any advice for the people who consider becoming a nurse?

Don’t go into nursing if you are not thinking about caring for patients. You really have to be able to care. All the skills I listed you are going to have to have because you will meet all sorts of patients, and I have met nurses who have been horrible to patients, and then you wonder why they chose this profession.

I would say nursing has to be for you, and you have to love nursing, if not- then don’t be a nurse. And I believe Direct Healthcare has nurses, who always wanted to be nurses.