what is working for the NHS like?

Hi, I’m going to be totally honest with you as someone who was an nhs nurse but made a change. I was an adult nurse but did paeds shifts as a care assistant/auxillary. Paeds is very different from adult with a slightly less regimented regime (some adult wards are very regimented and less person centred because of tight resources), paeds has a lot of parents pitching in for bathing etc and it’s just easier to change a nappy on a a child than on a 65 year old man that weighs 18 stone. However, I never found it particularly difficult to see adults in the last stages of their lives, mostly they were surrounded by family and had lived a life and so many amazing stories of a life lived. When I worked in neuro, I struggled a bit with the young people with young families dying, it felt too early and cruel, that I think would be even worse in paediatric nursing, not sure I could cope with watching young kids die. Death was a very frequent thing in adults, not sure how frequent it is in paeds though. I left nursing because in general, at least 80% of nurses I worked with I genuinely would consider horrible people, no matter the unit I worked in there seemed to be a massive amount of people who were horrible to patients, didn’t care about other staff and got away with being rude and humiliating other staff members, unfortunately this seemed to be worse within generations (older nurses bullying younger nurses). I am always wary of people who say nursing doesn’t have a bullying problem, these tend to be the people who will be absolutely horrific to people and get away with it because “they’re just plain talkers” or “that’s just how they are” it is very dog eat dog. I remember a nurse once being really quite nasty to me and when I went to the manager I was greeted with the notion that I should shout and swear back at her so she would respect me, leave me alone and move onto someone else. The work is hard, like the hardest work I have ever done in my life. Sometimes with rotas you can end up doing 8 13 hour shifts in a row a mix of days and nights. All your shifts will be short staffed, and there will be many times you will likely find yourself crying in a cupboard begging higher powers to intervene. Sometimes you will be doing everything humanly possible, staying hours and hours late across the week to do things for your patients that you think are so unwell they could die and because of single rooms none of your other patients will see this, think you’ve done nothing and will shout and swear at you about how horrific a person you are etc. You really are encountering people on their worst day, their emotions are high and they will not give you an ounce of grace as a result. I have been spat on, had faeces and urine flung at me, bitten, scratched, punched and more. If you get something wrong don’t expect it to be a 121 convo, expect it to be a passive aggressive rumour around the unit most places. Now, there are people I know who genuinely love it and even in the madness, would never leave. For me, it destroyed my life. I lost a lot of empathy for people, as was so use to people taking up space they didn’t need to. For example, one girl refused to leave the ED bay when she had a head cold until she got a scope from ENT (dr google), she was perfectly fine to leave the ED, or to at least wait in a seat if she wanted to wait, she refused to leave the bed though and as we waited for security to come to remove her, and the woman who was going to go into that bed, instead miscarried in the public corridor in front of everyone instead. That’s the type of stuff that just can make you feel like everyone in the world is selfish and horrible, and you can start to genuinely believe that. I’ve had colleagues commit suicide or have life long mental health issues from nursing and I personally, had to stop myself going there, so I left. I feel the last 10 years have been a literal blur, and I look back and see all the birthdays, weddings, Christmases and events I missed. I left and moved to the civil service and it was the best decision I ever made, far less stress, more money, still public focused. This is just my honest experience, I don’t think it would be everyone’s, but if someone I loved was thinking of a career in nursing I would beg them not to take the chance.