 Hi everyone and welcome. My name is Claire Carmichael, I'm a second year adult student nurse and I'm going into my third year in January and I can't wait. But today I'm here to tell you all about this amazing thing that we've just launched today and it is... That's right. The GPNSN General Practice Nursing Student Nurse Network. What does that mean? What does this mean? You all want to know because it's going to be amazing. You're going to be world by it. You're going to want to be part of it. You're going to want to share it. And here we go. Firstly, a little bit of background information. So the sort of nurse that I want to be is a general practice nurse. This is something that I've always wanted to do and always thought about doing but I never thought that I could do it myself. Especially as a newly qualified nurse, I was listening to all the myths of you can't be a newly qualified nurse. It's somewhere you're retired to and that really put me off to be honest. But then I started my nursing journey and this year, as some of you might know that's watching this vlog, I had a general practice placement and I just fell in love. If you haven't watched those vlogs yet, go back and have a look at those general practice placement vlogs and see how much you do as a general practice nurse. So I fell in love and I thought, you know what? This is for me. This is amazing. I absolutely love this. I want to shout about it. I want to blog about it. I want to vlog about it. It was that good. I wanted to promote it to death. So that's a little bit about my backstory. And when I qualify, hopefully I will become a general practice nurse and I will continue to be a general practice ambassador and share all the amazing things that general practice nurses do and get you really motivated and excited and dispel these myths that you keep hearing about general practice nursing. So this student nurse network that we have for GPN is full of dedicated, motivated, amazing, positive people that absolutely love primary care and they want to shout about it because we need more nurses in general practice. All of the general practice nurses, they are a little bit older. They're going to be retiring. There's going to be no nurses left and we're on a campaign to get more people into general practice. The government have recognized this and that's where the general practice 10-point plan has come into place. It's also part of the five-year forward view. I'm going to put the links below so make sure you read the links and have a look more around it. It's just amazing. It's amazing that the government are on board with this and something's been put into place to get more nurses into practice. So what myths are there around general practice nursing and what can we do about this? Myth number one. General practice is somewhere you retire to. You can't just go into that just as a young Cres student. No, that's a load of rubbish. Why would you want to retire into general practice nursing? Why wouldn't you want a long, healthy, happy career with amazing hours, with amazing patients that are going to grow old with you? And why? Why is it somewhere you retire to? Because is the misconception that it's full of a relaxed, chilled atmosphere that you don't do very much as a general practice nurse? Because when I had my placement in general practice, I mean, I knew general practice nurses did a lot. I didn't realize how much general practice nurses do. They just, they're constantly run off their feet. They've got patient after patient after patient. They are busy. So let's just raise that myth right now. It's not somewhere you retire to. It's somewhere you can have a long, happy, healthy career. Myth number two. Don't go to general practice because you're going to lose all of your skills. What? This has got to be the biggest bugbear of mine when people say you're going to lose your skills. You're going to lose what skills, what skills am I going to lose? Because general practice nurses do so, so much and more. General practice nursing. You would not believe the amount of skills you are going to use as a general practice nurse. You're going to be thinking of a patient in a holistic way. You're going to have to manage all of those emotions as well as the physical problems that they come into you with. You're going to be doing wound dressings. You're going to be given injections. You're going to be doing catheters. You're going to be doing so much as a general practice nurse you wouldn't believe. So I really want to know what exact skills am I going to lose? Because the core value skills that you need as a nurse is exactly what you need as a general practice nurse. Those core value skills, the six C's of nursing guys, care, communication, compassion, competence, commitment and courage, they are the six C's you need as a nurse. And you have to be working alongside an amazing team of doctors. You're going to see paramedics. You're going to have to work with your reception team, the other nurses, the healthcare assistants, phlebotomists. You're going to be working with a whole range of people in that practice area. So not only are you using your collaboration skills and your team working skills, you've got those core value skills as well. The only things that you might not do in general practice is an IV and a cannula. Two things. But unless you really want to do those every single day, on award, wherever you are in placement, unless you actually genuinely want to do those things every single day, they're the only two things that I can think of that a general practice nurse doesn't do. And even now district nurses are actually being trained to do that out at home because people are being cared for at home now. They're going to be doing those things at home. So you're going to need those skills as well as everything else that a general practice nurse needs. So let's just de-miff this whole skill thing because it's not nice. It's not nice to say that general practice nurses aren't skilled because they are. They really wowed me when I worked with them on my placement. I've never seen anyone work the way that that nurse worked and she was amazing. Myth number three. One of my personal favourites is you're going to need a year's experience in A&E before you do general practice nursing. You're going to need experience on the wards before you do general practice nursing. No! Why? Why do people say this? And I don't just hear this about general practice nursing. I'm sorry I'm laughing because it just makes me laugh when I read these comments in student forums on Facebook groups. I see it on Twitter as well. I see it across social media, okay? And this is not good, guys. If wherever you want to work, whatever you want to do, whatever sort of nurse you want to be, do you know what? Go out and do it. Don't let someone say to you. You need such and such experience before you go into that place. So you're going to train in another area doing all these different things. You're going to waste a year of your life, six months of your life. You're going to have to train doing that particular area the way that area works. You're going to be training and doing all of that, knowing that in your heart you don't want that. You want general practice nursing or you want a district nursing role. If you even A&E, I've heard people say, you know, you can't work in an A&E until you've had such and such experience. It's a never-ending circle of life. But you know what? You're going to be in that area. You're going to be training. Your heart's not going to be in it. And then you apply for your general practice nursing job or your district nursing job or whatever area you're going to go into. Having gained that year's experience to then retrain because it's a whole different set of skills that you're going to be using. Okay, we all have the same core values and six seas and all of that. But there's different ways of doing things. There's different computer systems. There's a different team to collaborate with. There's all these different things that you're going to have to retrain on because you've got a different area and experience from a different place. And now you're having to do it all again. It doesn't make sense to me in my head. Does this make sense to you? Because I'm trying to explain it, but my personal opinion is why should you train somewhere you don't want to work to then to train and get all the knowledge from that particular area, that speciality to then go into another area, another speciality with a whole different system and having to retrain again. It doesn't make sense. It does not make sense to me. So no, do you know what? If you want to work in the community, if you want to work in primary care, if you want to work on a ward, if you want to work in a particular area, if you want to work in sexual health and family planning, go and apply. If you're a newly qualified nurse, you're coming up to the end of your degree. You're ready to apply for jobs. Apply. Get your voice and your name heard. Apply to that area. Tell them why you're going to be amazing. Get in. Get in there. Tell them. Sell yourself. Be passionate and tell them why they should pick you because no amount of experience on any other area is going to prepare you for that particular area. That's my point that I'm trying to get across. And I know for 100% fact that as a newly qualified nurse, you can apply to a general practice to become a general practice nurse straight away without getting all of that experience from another ward, another placement area. Don't do it. Don't waste your time. If general practice is where you want to be like me, get applying. Okay. And just fall in love with general practice like I did. And just don't listen to all of the negative comments. Don't listen to the advice of going to work in different areas. If that's where you want to be for the rest of your career, go and do it. Get out there. Part of the 10 point plan is all about getting the student nurses into general practice as well. So not only am I saying in it, I'm giving you the evidence behind what I'm saying. It's there. It's in writing. You are going to be welcomed with open arms into general practice as a newly qualified nurse. So please erase that myth. There we go. It's erased. It's gone. Now we're on a fresh start. So on a final note, I just wanted to talk about why I particularly love general practice and why I want to become a general practice nurse. So for me personally in my own experience, when I was out on placement, I just completely fell in love. I loved that you saw literally from pregnancy all the way to death. So you saw them pregnant. You saw them coming with their babies, then newborn babies for the vaccines, seeing them as children and growing up. You're seeing different family members as well. So one day you might see the child. One day you might see the dad. The next day you might see the sister, the aunt. And you really build up that strong bond with your patients and you see the patient back again and again and again. And you'll see them in a true holistic way. And that's the real love of mine. I love seeing patients in a holistic way and thinking about their psychological needs, their social needs, their physical needs, combining it all as one because that's literally how we should be nursing. I think I don't like just treating a symptom and that's it. I like to think about the whole picture and prevention and health promotion. I like to prevent the illness from happening and I am very hot on prevention and health promotion massively. So to do that out in general practice and if I can prevent somebody from having a hospital admission and fair enough you won't prevent it all the time. There are going to be a lot of the time where you can't prevent it and it just happens and there will be a hospital admission. But if I can do my utmost to prevent that from happening and motivate patients to lead healthier lives and think about things holistically and just prevent that from happening that is my job done and that to me is like the most rewarding thing I can ever think of and it's just really lovely, the bonds that you get with your patients and they come back to you time and time again and they're really grateful and they really trust you and they really respect you and that for me is just that's why I love general practice nursing. I absolutely adore it. I love the whole age ranges. I love that you're going to see like an elderly person one day, a young person another day. You're going to see a teenager. You're going to see someone with different mental health conditions. You're going to see people learning disabilities. There is no end to general practice nursing. They are a jack of all trades and they manage it so well and I just pray that I make an amazing general practice nurse and I really do everybody and myself proud and hopefully I'm going to motivate and inspire all of you guys watching this now to become general practice nursing and really think differently or even if you don't want to do general practice nursing or become a general practice nurse yourself just to really think differently about it and not see it as somewhere to retire to and pass on the information as well. You can all help by passing on this information just to dispel these myths and get rid of the stigma and let's promote it. Let's inspire people to become GPNs and let's just, yeah, provide an amazing service to everybody. So thank you so much for tuning in and watching and if you have any questions about general practice nursing or nursing in general, please feel free to comment to drop me a message on my inbox. My social media has always opened 24-7. Give me an inbox and I'll reply and yeah, good luck if you're studying, if you're applying to nursing, good luck and have an amazing day wherever you are, whatever you're doing, enjoy.