This month, I’ll have been at Nutricia for 10 years - so I’m just about to get my long service badge! It’s gone by so quickly that I can’t quite believe it.

Before I started at Nutricia, I had been working in sales and business development for a long time and I was ready to move on. I live quite near the Nutricia head office, so I knew quite a few people who were working (or had worked) for Nutricia, and I really liked what they had to say about the company and the kind of place it was to work in. So, I always had the idea in my mind that if an opportunity came up to work at Nutricia, I would be interested.

What I wasn’t expecting was that I’d receive a phone call from a recruiter asking if I’d be interested in a role with Nutricia’s nursing service. I thought it sounded very interesting, so I got in touch with Nutricia, had some discussions and really liked what I heard. I joined the company as a Regional Nurse Manager, and then I transitioned to the Quality and Development Management role just before the pandemic hit. 

My role now involves working across patient services, including nursing, customer service and other patient-facing functions. But when I arrived at Nutricia, this had been the first time in many years that I'd worked with a nursing team. 

There are two main functions of my role. One is around quality; that includes supporting our licence to operate by making sure that we are working within our policies, that we are doing the best for our patients, that we are managing them within the right governance frameworks - whether that is about data management, the clinical procedures we do, or anything that has any legislation attached to it,  and that's also where the Care Quality Commission and the Scottish Care Inspectorate come in. My job is to continually ensure that we are doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way for our Homeward patients and support our staff to carry out their duties safely.. 

The second function of my role is focused on learning and development, particularly with regard to how we train our staff to make sure that they're working within our policies in all of the ways mentioned above. So the two aspects of my job go hand-in-hand; our staff can't work in an effective way and manage all of their activities from the perspective of quality and safety if they’re not trained well  to do so in the first place. We have many contracts with various NHS Trusts and Health Boards and we work in partnership with the NHS. My team enables our staff to understand how it all applies to them, and enables them to do their jobs safely and to the best possible standard. 

No two days are the same in my role, but what it often includes is me playing Detective. We do sometimes have incidents as every organisation does- but rather than look at each incident on a solely case-by-case basis, what I try to do is  interrogate what has happened and look for trends. We’re always seeking to understand the root cause of anything that goes wrong, so we can learn from it and prevent it happening again. That means examining incidents  in a wider context, from a systems perspective, and trying to establish if there is a way that we can improve how we operate as a result. It’s really interesting, and very rewarding when you identify a way that you can make a positive change. There’s always some kind of improvement that we can take away. 

My favourite part of the job is when I have an opportunity to hear about the good things that have come about as a result of the work we do. Sometimes it’s just by being with my team and hearing what they’re doing; or even  that something positive has been implemented as the result of an incident. And of course, anything we  do that helps a patient or their carers is tremendously rewarding,- even if it comes from a place that is initially negative. 

One example I remember was a lady who had complained about something  in relation to her husband. She was frustrated on his behalf. He had cancer, and it took some effort to understand what was going on because we had done everything we could in terms of providing more nursing support, more training, her deliveries were on time and ensuring that everything was done absolutely as they wanted - but she was still unhappy. 

So I decided to make contact with her myself and what I learned, once I sat down with her was that they were grieving for how their lives had changed. This gentleman had been something of a bon vivant, and he and his wife loved throwing dinner parties and entertaining. Now, he had a feeding tube and couldn’t eat and drink in the way that he once could. That was so hard for them both.  It really made me think hard about how we often take eating and drinking for granted; it’s not just nutrition - it’s social and cultural as well. All they needed in the end was to be heard, and to have this fundamental change in their lives understood and acknowledged. As a result, this is now one of the things that we talk about regularly when training our new nurses: that our patients have had a big change in their lives, and we must never lose sight of that when helping them. 

One achievement we are particularly proud of is our performance during an unplanned inspection by the Care Inspectorate Scotland. Nutricia is only registered for nursing in Scotland, and the Care Inspectorate only ever do unplanned inspections,  so we knew from the moment we registered that our team in Scotland would have to prepare for such an inspection by pulling together examples of the sorts of things they do as nurses every day, and in relation to Scotland-specific policies and training. By doing that we have been prepared for an inspection from the moment we registered in Scotland, so we were prepared when they came to inspect us - with just 10 minutes notice -in June this year.