Sweet and sour

25 Aug 2012 Leave a comment

by Carole Gardiner in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

In the week I had a phone call to inform me that my occupational health clearance was ready and my last reference had been collected and verified. So I was officially offered the healthcare assistant position on the  nurse bank at the new South  Bristol Community hospital.

I start an induction week from the 3rd of September, to do all the mandatory training such as manual handling, fire safety, health and safety and lots of other exciting stuff like that. Then I will be let loose on the wards to work when I’m able and when they want me.

At least then I’ll have something to do as I still don’t have my CRB to enable me to start my nurse practice for my Return to nurse practice course. Last week I found out the reason why I had not received it…. the form was never sent!

I phoned the CRB helpline to discover that they had no record of me. A call to the recruitment department told me that all my paperwork for the honorary contract was handed over to the person doing the checks for the hospital job. Unfortunately the urgency of time was not handed over and the importance of the CRB check for my honorary contract was lost.

So what now? well I wait. Apparently, at the moment, the checks are taking on average 9 days to be returned. In the meantime I have been liaising with the management team on the unit to meet my mentor to go through my objectives and competences. I’ve identified any competences  I can achieve without being on the unit and will get my teeth into those.

If the CRB comes back within 2 weeks I’m confident I can fit in the hours I need to do before the beginning of November.

I live in hope.

The waiting game

18 Jul 2012 2 Comments

by Carole Gardiner in Uncategorized Tags: , , , ,

I’m having  a really frustrating time at the moment. Although I’ve started the Return to nurse practice course at university, I’m still waiting for my honorary contract to be organised by the hospital trust where I’ll be doing my nurse practice hours. Without the contract I can’t start on the unit and I’m conscious time is creeping on and I’ll run out of time to get my minimum amount of hours done.

What I’m worried about is I’m not used to working and I want to ease myself into it and complete the hours without getting exhausted. But as more time goes by I fear I will have to cram in the hours to get them done by the end of the course.

I rang the recruitment department of the trust today to check on the progress so far, as I filled in the preliminary paperwork over a month ago. Having being on hold for so long that I listened to all of Lionel Ritchie’s greatest hits, I finally got through to someone with some answers. My paperwork had only just arrived in their department this morning, so God only knows where it has been for the last few weeks.

I still have a bit of a wait as I need to have a CRB check, occupational health assessment and mandatory training to be done. I’m trying to remain positive and hope that it’ll all be sorted soon.