Hi I am Joanne Mohammed and as well as being a ward manager on ward C10 I am also an Ambassador for the Trust for Nursing Now England.
My ambassador story began in In May 2018 when I became involved in a national campaign commissioned by Professor Jane Cummings then Chief Nursing Officer for England.
It was in response to a survey she found that said very few parents would suggest nursing as a career choice for their children. So, in order to try and rectify this, she introduced the Transforming Perceptions Campaign.
The initiative was looking to implement and deliver game-changing ideas to support the future of nursing and midwifery, improve recruitment into the profession and change perceptions of nurses.
From a nursing point of view, the opportunities offered by a career in nursing and midwifery have never been better, with roles ranging from the essential day-to-day caring responsibilities – to the highly technical, research, executive leadership – and many, many more.
The objectives of the campaign are:
- To let young people know about the exciting breadth of careers available within nursing and for teachers to promote nursing and midwifery as a career of choice.
- For nurses and midwives to reignite their pride in their professions.
- To ensure that system leaders and decision makers put nursing and midwifery expertise is at the heart of shaping future healthcare policy.
The ambassadors were asked to sign up to 12 30-day challenges which are outlined below at the bottom of this blog.
Over the course of the last 6 months, I and other ambassadors within the trust have participated in these challenges. In December 2018 the Transforming Perceptions campaign under the guidance of Jane Cummings joined with the Nursing Now 2020 network and was renamed NURSING NOW ENGLAND. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend the launch in London at the RCN headquarters in London along with fellow ambassadors and represent East Lancashire Hospitals.
As Nursing Now England Ambassadors we have continued to respond to the important issues of recruitment and retention by working at personal, local and regional as well as national level. We have created a social movement through a collaborative approach, campaigning to improve health globally by raising the status and profile of nursing; demonstrating what it can achieve and enabling nurses to maximise their contribution to achieving universal health coverage.
Over the next few months, I will be developing further the ambassador network at East Lancashire Hospitals and participating in the January and February Challenges. One of which is visiting schools and speaking to young people about nursing as a profession.
Jane Pemberton and I would like to invite nurses who are interested in helping to continue to develop the network of ambassadors within East Lancashire Hospitals to a couple of hour long events that we have scheduled at the end of the month:
- 30 January 15.30 to 16.30 at Kiddrow Lane Health Centre
- 31 January 15:00 to 16:00 seminar room 2 at the education centre RBH
If you are a registered nurse you are very welcome to attend.
As nurses, we can sit wringing our hands and bemoaning the number of nurse vacancies that there are in the country. Or, we can work together and change the perceptions of our wonderful profession in order to promote it as a positive career choice.
No-one is going to change those perceptions for us, it’s up to us to be the change agents in this process. We need to reignite the pride that we have in our profession. So, come and join us and together we can make a difference…
You can follow the Nursing Now England story on Twitter by following:
#NursingNowEngland
@NN_England