I was, I was originally on the mentor register when I was on the wards. And research has only just started taking student nurses. At the moment from here. We’ve only had one student and they’re currently third year students. And we’re in the process of developing a training package for them because research is very, very intense. A lot of it can be quite boring and laborious, and it’s how we keep a student interested. So, I’ve been actively involved in setting up that, and we’re getting our second student coming, who’s going to be working with me, where initially my first student that I just had for three days on different times. I was more of a support mentor, this time I’m going to have them for two weeks so that we can actually be specific, and what we learnt from our last student in the feedback was that we’re not, we don’t need to be too broad. We need to be more specific. So, give them an overview of what’s going on and then say because they’re third year students, Is there a particular area that you’re looking at? Are you interested in breast? Are you in bladder? Is it lung that you’re more interested in? And then try and be, to, to guide them into one protocol, understanding one protocol. Because protocols are all the same, they just say different stuff. But you follow it and they’re all, they’re all the same at the end of the day.

So, getting them to understand about why we do the paperwork, what it involves, why we ask the questions we ask, why is that important? Knowing and trying to explain to them the different types of studies. Why it’s important that we look at toxicities when people are taking drugs. Why, the one that I’m going to be working on at the moment is my bladder cancer one, cos it’s a questionnaire one, and it’s looking at people’s experiences from diagnosis to treatment, and how that works. How people feel about the moment they’re told the bad news, to how long it took to get that bad news, and how that works.

Cos that’s one of the things that sort of worried me when I first came into research is that it was only a one-year contract. But on the backside, or on the good side of that was actually that if I went in and I didn’t like it, and I just couldn’t do it, I’ve got a wonderful get-out clause that doesn’t look bad on my CV. I’ve got 14 years of experience that gets me back into the ward, with a little bit of refreshing, so it was an ideal opportunity, it was a bit like a secondment I felt when I was going in, that I’ll go in, I’ll give it twelve months, yeah, and then I will make a decision. I actually love it, so it’s, it was very beneficial for me to get a permanent contract, but it didn’t really worry me that much, as much as I know it has worried other colleagues about not having a permanent contract. Everybody has a mortgage to pay and the bills, so things like that. But I always knew that I would be able to get a job if this didn’t work. I could go back to where I was I can travel, not ideally but I know as a nurse I have enough knowledge and experience to be able to go back into nursing.

So, this was like a secondment for me, and it would be an ideal way to see, put my foot in the water, and say actually, You know I’m glad I give it a go, but it’s really not for me. And research is not for everybody, it really isn’t. But fortunately for me, it is. It’s one of the best decisions or progressive decisions that I’ve made, it was the right time to move.

It was lovely for about four months but now you have two days to do everything. So, you have to do all your cleaning, all your washing, all your shopping on a Saturday. On a Sunday you’re getting ready to come back to work on a Monday. So, I do miss, I never thought I would say it, miss working shifts. I don’t miss nights at all, they can be gone. But I do miss 2 o’clock finish where I could go home, chill out, cup of tea, feet up, watch a little bit of crummy television. Have a bit of a nap, where now, and it’s very, very tiring, it is, I’m like most nights I am in bed by ten, cos I’m up at six. I only live well I live about, it’s about 25 miles away, so it’s about 25, 30 minutes away. And it’s not a bad commute, but parking is a nightmare, you don’t get parking privileges because you work nine till five, so that’s very, very difficult. I don’t have a, a very good bus route that would get me in for the times that I need to do cos I live in a, in a little country village now, so there was all that to look at, so what I do now is I arrive at work about quarter to eight every day regardless of whether I start at eight or nine.

And I find that, I can go and have a coffee, just chill out, have a hello to whoever’s around, and then from nine o’clock I’m ready for my day. When I first started I was looking 40 minutes for parking, you were stressed out before you’d even started work and it’s not a good way to be going in. It was new, it was all fresh and it was a little bit scary, but I was very, very anxious. So, parking is a very, something to be aware of. I think that’s in any hospital that I’ve worked in, parking has always been difficult.

Try to change the way that you think about you don’t have to know it all now. Do you know, take it back to when you were doing your nursing career as a, the first six months of being a student and you were just thinking, Oh my god, what have I done? You know I’ll never, what’s this I don’t understand that? And research is very much like that. You just come with thinking, Oh I’ve got ten years of knowledge, this is going to serve me well. And it, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But just give yourself time. Give yourself at least six months before you make any rash decisions and give yourself at least twelve months to say, I think after twelve months you would know whether it was for you or not. I think that the cat in the headlights is going to be there for six months, don’t worry about it. Easier said than done. I worried about it. And then suddenly you just realise that things are clicking without you even realising. And what you worried about last week, you don’t worry about anymore now because you’ve, it’s there, it’s embedded. It’s that knowledge that you can call upon without thinking. You know, go and find me this protocol, What’s a protocol? You know, Which protocol? To suddenly going, Oh yeah, it’s in the filing cabinet C, second drawer, right at the back. You have to squeeze round because it’s really full, but it’s there, and you can do it. There it is. And you do that without thinking, and that is a personal achievement you don’t realise, and I am probably just talking to you realising more about how I’ve moved on in 15 months to where I am now, to thinking that. Yeah. It was very, very scary. But as long as you’re prepared for that, and you don’t let it overwhelm you so much to just think I can’t do it. You, it might not be for you but give it a go, definitely give it a good go, give it a good six months and then give it another six months after that to say, Am I sorted? Is this really for me? Because it might not be, but at least you’ve tried. And that’s the same with anything in life.

Initial induction, so it was getting to know the R&D [Research & Development] department, and the team in general. I worked closely with my now manager because it was their trials that I was taking over. We did a lot of SOP [Standard Operating Procedure] training, just finding out the, the lay of the land. I did a lot of reading on what research is, GCP [Good Clinical Practice], clinical governance, MHRA [Medicines and Health Regulatory Agency], all them sort of acronyms that I’m still getting my head round but are all there which says about why we do what we do, Good Clinical Practice, consenting courses. And then it was shadowing different people to see how they do it, how it’s done. I wouldn’t like to say properly because everybody does it properly, but you do find your own way and what used to, a follow up that used to take me an hour and a half to two hours, I can potentially do in 40 minutes now. Because it’s straightforward and I know where to find things, and that’s just learning, it just comes. You have to realise that research is very, very different to any nursing thing that I’ve done. And until you do it you will never know how different it is, but you just have to accept that you’re starting again from scratch effectively, and that’s very difficult when you’ve, you’ve ran a ward and you’ve been able to deal with any incident, and somebody comes up and say, Fill this out, and you’re like, What is it? yeah. So, it’s just a very, very slow process, but there’s no rush.

The patient information leaflets come from the trials. But it’s, it’s your own communication skills it comes with, I’ve been nursing for 15 years now, it’s something you learn to do, and you work off their cues, their verbal cues, their non-verbal cues. And you talk in a language that they can understand. Some people are, are very, very knowledgeable and they tell you that this, and you’re discussing them and they take you off on a tangent about some other trial that was on. And some people just really don’t know very much about it and just need it in very plain basic English, and some people don’t want to know anything about it. They’re happy to take part, they know that it’s going to be a chemotherapy drug but they don’t really want to know too much. So, it’s all about the conversation that you’re having with the patient. It’s all about the discussion. And there’s no set rules or set laws, you have to gain an understanding that they know what’s going to be happening to them, and actually what they’re consenting to. But that level of knowledge you have to discern as a nurse to say that I have to sign to say that I am sure that they’re aware of what they’re doing.

And that’s just through conversation.

I didn’t realise how much admin there was going to be done. And how much physical desk work and paper work and actual research, as I understood it, was searching through documents and things that I would need to do. Inclusion, exclusion criteria. Again, at the very beginning I just thought this is never ever going to sink in. I had, at that time I had ten trials and I just thought I am never ever going to understand this. Again, the team were fantastic, saying that you don’t have to, you do not have to understand every single aspect of the trial, you don’t need to know that protocol from front to back, what you need are key words and you need to be able to understand how to read a protocol. So it’s not, I imagined it’s a bit like a bible, you don’t read it from front to back, what you do is you go into the area that you need to do, inclusion criteria, exclusion criteria, assessments, dates when chemotherapy is, so you need to be able to find them, and once you, you accept that and realise that you literally cannot know everything, it makes your life a lot easier. And that you then don’t need to worry about something until it’s there and it needs to be done.

I was, initially I, I actually thought it would be a lot easier than it, it was. And for all the people that I’d spoken to they said, you, it is totally different. It is, it’ll be nothing you’ve ever experienced before. And I thought, I’m sure it’ll be alright, I know head and neck, I know urology. And it was just totally different. So, it was very overwhelming for about six months. And I think within my first six months I probably thought twice have I made the right decision because protocols and paperwork and e-CRF’s and sponsors and industry, they just baffled me. I have a portfolio now of eleven trials that I currently look after. So, and it’s took me probably up until Christmas, which was just about my year, that I, I started to feel secure in what I know. And my background in nursing has helped, be it, for the language mainly. I understand when they’re talking about tumours and things like that, but it’s been a massive learning curve. It’s been really, really interesting and I still love it, and I’m so glad that I made the, the change.