Excellence, dedication and compassionate care is being celebrated today (12.5) at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn (QEH) as International Nurses Day is marked across the globe.
At Team QEH we have 1,084 skilled nurses caring for patients on wards, our emergency departments and in a variety outpatient settings.
In 2022/23 more than 76,000 new patients attended the QEH in need of care, the vast majority will have been supported and cared for in some way by one of our nurses.
Helen Blanchard, Interim Chief Nurse at the QEH, said: “I’d like to say a very big thank you to each and every one of our nurses here at Team QEH.
“International Nurses Day is an opportunity for us to recognise the vital contribution that our nursing workforce makes across the NHS. We simply would not be able to provide the care we do without our team of dedicated nurses – they are the lifeline of our hospital.
“I am a proud nurse myself so celebrating my nursing colleagues is something I am very passionate about. Thank you, to our nurses for all you do and all you will continue to do, thank you for your dedication to our patients and to the profession – you mean so much.”
As a celebration of the day, nurses at The QEH will be treated to cake deliveries throughout the weekend as a small way of thanking them for their hard work.
Tom Edwards, Nursing Degree Apprentice on West Newton Ward joined us as a health care assistant and said he wanted to be a nurse because: “I love the idea of being able to help people and when I heard about the ‘home-grown’ scheme of training to be a nurse I knew this was the role for me.
“This enabled me to train in a ward-based setting gaining invaluable experience. The feeling of getting home from work and knowing you’ve made such a positive impact on the lives of your patients and their loved ones really is what makes my job so worthwhile. I love to go the extra step to make my patients and families feel reassured and well cared for during their stay. Even during the busiest of shifts, I feel supported within my team of colleagues and a mix of these two things are the reason I love my job as a nursing degree apprentice.”
The QEH has a long history of celebrating international nursing talents from across the globe. In February this year the Trust welcomed it’s 50th cohort of international nurses.
The QEH opened its doors to nurses and midwifes from outside the EU/EEA in 2016 when The Nursing and Midwife Council introduced a competency test as part of their registration process.
Since then, Team QEH has welcomed more than 400 international nurses who have brought a wealth of experience and expertise with them.
If you’d like to find out more about a career in nursing please visit: University of East Anglia or Anglia Ruskin University. If you are a registered nurse and interested in joining Team QEH, please contact Jade Dennis, recruitment and retention coordinator via email at jade.dennis@qehkl.nhs.uk.
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For further information, please contact Communications Team, media.enquiries@qehkl.nhs.uk or 01553 613216.
To download the press release and photos click here.
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