Melanie is an Advanced Healthcare Assistant caring for high dependency patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at University Hospitals Leicester. She provides day to day nursing care to patients after elective surgery before they progress to the wards.
We asked Melanie what she loved about nursing. “What don’t I love about nursing!” she replied “I’m a people-person and always have been. I love the relationships you build with patients. I’m good at chatting to patients, sometimes so much so that they fall asleep!
“Working on ICU can be upsetting at times as you see people at their most vulnerable. But it’s rewarding when you see them improve and move to the ward and then it’s fantastic when they’ve recovered completely and they pop in to say hello.
“I find it very rewarding knowing that I’m making the experience better for those people.”
Before choosing nursing as a career, Melanie worked part time on a supermarket checkout whilst bringing up her young family. She loved chatting to her regular customers and there was one in particular who she enjoyed speaking to,
“A local nurse who would pop in at the end of her shift to do her shopping and she would tell me all about what she did at work which fascinated me. As well as this, I’d also had experience as an inpatient a few times and really enjoyed chatting to the other patients on my ward and helping them when the nursing team was understaffed.
“So I became interested and thought I could do a nursing job.”
Melanie started on the ICU as a housekeeper and progressed to Healthcare Assistant (HCA).
“I quickly realised that I wanted more of a hands-on role looking after people so when the Advanced HCA role became available I worked towards that and it has given me more opportunities to care for patients in ICU. I’ve been doing this role for 5 years now.”
Melanie won a Cavell Star Award for going above and beyond for her patients. Her colleague and Senior Sister Emma Barnacle explains why Melanie deserved her award,
“Mel has always been a huge support to patients on the unit. She makes an effort to chat and bond with patients even when she’s not allocated to care for them.
“Patients often ask after Mel when she’s not here and leave messages of sincere thanks when they are discharged. Mel brings warmth, energy and a lot of humour for our patients and their relatives during their time with us. Our intensive care unit is so lucky to have Mel in the team.”
Melanie reacted to winning her Cavell Star Award,
“I was totally in shock! I didn’t expect it, I don’t do the job for the recognition but it was amazing to be thought of so highly by my colleagues. It makes you want to come back and do your job even better.
“I work with a fantastic team and I consider a lot of my colleagues as family. We’re all really good at looking out for each other when things get tough at work.
“The Cavell Star Awards are a great thing and I hope more people hear about it and nominate colleagues to win an award. It brings such great job satisfaction.”
Read more about Melanie