During my nursing career, I have developed into a leader largely through personal drive, passion and motivation to advance my personal development and service provision. I have not had a lot of formal leadership development and have recently been appointed to this new post. The role has a strong strategic and influencing role and I realised that I would need to develop new skills in order to achieve this and advance Teenage and Young Adult nursing care across the Network. The post was in a strong position to influence the local, national and international development of Teenage and Young Adult nursing and provide the necessary leadership to Teenage and Young Adult nurses, in an increasingly challenging healthcare environment. I was under the impression that to maximise my effectiveness in this new role, I would need to develop a more strategic approach to nursing and healthcare. I would need influencing skills at a political and international level in order to raise the profile of this small group of patients. To achieve this I would need to develop both personally and professionally as a leader.
I was hoping that by undertaking this scholarship, I would be equipped with the skills to develop as a leader and therefore influence and lead other professionals and I would have a much better understanding of myself and where I wanted my career to go in the future.
By May 2015, I had decided that I really wanted to focus on my personal development. I wanted to learn more about myself and what sort of leader and nurse I wanted to be. I was starting to question my career choice and was not sure that I was in the right job or working in the right organisation.
The leadership scholarship has given me the opportunity to think about what it is I really wanted and where it is I want to be. It has given me the opportunity to take time out from the work environment so that I can truly reflect and have some time to think. I realised that I wanted to return to the clinical field and once again be able to give direct clinical care. I wanted to make a difference to the lives of the patients and families that I am lucky enough to meet. I have ended up in a very different place from where I started at the beginning of this leadership scholarship, but I personally don’t think that this is a bad thing. I truly believe that I will be a much better nurse for being through this leadership scholarship, meeting the other fellow scholars, undertaking the master classes, attending Ashridge, undertaking the shadowing opportunities and visits and being supported by the Florence Nightingale Foundation and Elizabeth Robb.
My thanks go to:
Professor Elizabeth Robb OBE
The Florence Nightingale Foundation
Teenage Cancer Trust
Sue Machell
Elizabeth Morgan
Flo Panel-Coates
Caroline Turnbull