Why I Became A Community Healthcare Assistant

Are you thinking about making a career change into the care sector? Nick decided to do just that and shares his journey with his end goal in mind, of becoming a Nurse and working for the NHS.

Hello, my name's Nick Dowling, and I currently work as a Band 3, Community Healthcare Assistant for an NHS Trust in the Southeast of England. I've been doing that since the beginning of 2022, so at this stage, its early days.

In this short video, I'm going to tell you how I came to be working for the NHS, because for the 10 years previous to this, I've been running my own training business. And to tell you a little bit about how I found my first few months in the role.

So how come I'm now working for the NHS?

My Background

For nearly 10 years, I've volunteered as a Community First Responder with my local ambulance service. That's a voluntary role, attending to medical emergencies in the community ahead of ambulance crew turning up. I've really enjoyed that. I liked the clinical side of it. I liked helping people. I liked working with ambulance crews.

And then COVID came along, and a lot of my training work, my own business, vaporized, and it all moved online, which I wasn't enjoying very much.

I also did an awful lot of additional voluntary elements with the ambulance service during COVID, and I found that that really energized me. It strengthened me, it's what I enjoyed doing.

So I started to think about leaving my training business behind and moving into a role in the care sector, and then there's a few decisions I needed to make along the way.

Choosing NHS or Private Care Sector?

One of the first ones was NHS or private, and there's pros and cons to both.

I decided I wanted to work for the NHS for a bunch of reasons.

One of which I have to say is the pension. I'm counting on working for at least another 10, maybe 12 years, and NHS pension is going to be helpful if it carries on for that role.

There were other considerations as well, for example, the NHS being a very respectful employer. It's a value driven organization, and by and large, it does try and live those values in terms of how it treats its employees.

And also the NHS, I think it's the biggest employer in Europe. There's over 500,000 people who work for it, and there's a huge variety of jobs. The breadth of options that were available was amazing.

But it is also a bit of a closed shop, the NHS, regardless of all the shortages there might be, it can be quite hard to get in. So I set my sights low, if you want to put it like that, and aimed for a Band 3 role.

Choosing A Position That Works For Me

I then started looking for adverts for those types of roles close to me. I also spoke to lots of friends who work in the NHS. Pretty universally, they said that I was mad to do it, and that I should carry on doing what I was doing.

However, my friend Jackie gave me two really good bits of advice. She said if I was going to do it, I should make sure I did it on my own terms and on terms that worked for me.

The other bit of advice was to do with Vicks VapoRub, which we don't need to mention here, but top tip.

So I applied for a couple of roles, didn't get them, and then this Community Health Care Assistant role in my local hospital came up and I applied for that and was successful.

I think what stood me in good stead was the fact I’d been a responder, that's in the community, and it's dealing with medical emergencies, and it's dealing with patients, and a part of it is being able to take a full set of clinical observations fairly quickly and then understand what they mean. And a lot of that plays through into the HCA role.

In terms of making it work for me, I needed some time to transition out of my training business, I couldn't just give that up overnight. So I started off working 30 hours a week, and I did that on 3 shifts, and that's still what I'm working now.

I do 2 long days, 12 hour shifts, and one 8 hour shift, and they are anywhere, across the week. And so, that leaves me with 4 free days a week, and that gave me plenty of time to sort out my other business and just keep both running in parallel for a while until, I was sure. Do I want to stay in this, is it for me?

What I Enjoy About What I Do

9 months in, I'm happy to say, yes, this definitely is for me. I absolutely love my role. I really like the team that I work with. They're super helpful, knowledgeable, professional, encouraging. I like the variety of my work a lot.

So, we're a bridging service.

We deal with 3 patient cohorts, supported discharge, admission avoidance, and end of life, and so our patient cohort is changing constantly, and I like that. I like the fact that I'm out in the community. I'm going around seeing people at home, and so there's a lot of variety there.

Each patient is obviously unique, so there's a lot of variety in what I'm dealing with. There's also a lot of commonalities. There's a lot of personal care involved. There's a lot of meds administration, but there's also more clinical elements to the role, and that's the bit that I really enjoy.

There are also therapy elements to what I do, and that's valuable, but it's not for me. Clinical is what I'm really enjoying, and I'm learning so much and have been since day one, that that's great.

Opportunities To Progress Are Plentiful

And, as a Band 3, there are definitely lots of opportunities to progress.

For example, clinical skills, if that's what you want to do, so I've been signed off now for insulin administration. I'm doing my venepuncture training shortly and will also be doing some slightly more advanced wound care work, which is all of what interests and excites me.

In my role, I've got a huge amount of autonomy. I get computer generated visit list each day, and then I go on to do my visits. And I may or may not see anyone from my team except at our daily handover meeting, and I'm just left to get on and do.

There were other considerations as well for example, the NHS being a very respectful employer. It's a value driven organisation, and by and large, it does try and live those values in terms of how it treats its employees.

And I mentioned about NHS being respectful and values driven, so that means in my community role, for example, I get paid decent mileage rate. I get paid for my travel time. I'm not given, "You've got 15 minutes to do this visit and no more, and we're only paying you for 15." Some of which I believe is prevalent in the private sector.

Pros and cons, as I said that too. What are some of the cons about working in the NHS?

Oh, it's a bit of a bureaucracy, and from someone who's used to being self-employed for, like I say, over 10 years, to now have to get into the routine of 12 weeks’ notice, if you want annual leave, things that don't work, not being fixed forever and ever. For example, we all know our thermometers aren't very good, but getting them swapped out for ones that do work properly just seems to take forever.

But they're small crosses to bear in the scheme of things.

My Next Step As A NHS Trainee Nurse Associate Apprentice

Overall, it's been a really big success for me, I'm very happy to have done it.

I'm intending to apply for a TNA, Trainee Nurse Associate Apprenticeship, and hopefully, if I get that, two years study, and I'll have a foundation degree, that will allow me to be a Nurse Associate, that might suffice for me.

But from where I am now, a community nursing role also sounds really attractive, and that'd be another year's study. So in 3 years’ time, potentially, I could be a Community Nurse, which excites me no end.

So that's how I've come to be in my role. It's been a big success for me, and yeah, the things that helped at the outset particularly were keeping an eye on jobs, and then seeing what's going on out there, and being sort of being ready to pounce when the right one came along.

So I hope that's been of some interest to you.

Possibly going to make another video for Matt and his team at Nurses.co.uk about my plan for survival.

How am I going to cope for the next 10 to 12 years? 'Cause I don't want to just survive; I want to thrive.

So there's already things that I'm putting in place to help look after myself from a physical and emotional point of view, and I'll talk a little bit more about them another time, okay.

Thank you, hope that's been useful.

Cheerio, bye.