Column

A sudden death can be difficult to handle...

Sheila Goodwin, a sister in a coronary care unit, tells healthmatters of a day in her life

When somebody comes in and dies very suddenly the family aren’t prepared, and you’ve not met them before and they are hysterical, then that’s very difficult to handle.

We get a fair number of deaths. A death doesn’t necessarily make it a bad day, if you’ve done everything that you can for a patient. If you know that a patient hasn’t died in pain and hasn’t been distressed, and you’ve been able to spend enough time with the family and prepare them, it’s not a nice thing to happen, but it doesn’t necessarily make it a bad day. A bad day is the sort of day where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve got to do next, you’ve got about six jobs to think about and your patients are coming in three at a time.

When you come on a shift you don’t know exactly what you’ll have to deal with that day. It might be very quiet, but suddenly something happens and you’ve got to get into top gear. That’s one of the things about the job. Having the adrenaline going is exciting, as long as it’s not going all the time. Just enjoying helping people recover — having people come back to say ‘thank you, you were ever so kind to me’ — that’s what keeps you doing it.

First thing in the morning I come in and take handover from the shift going off. If there’s not too much happening the next thing I do is go round and speak to all the patients — ask them how they’ve slept and whether they’ve got any problems.

It’ll vary from day to day — you never quite know how many patients you’ll have. When you come on and it’s really busy, if there’s something acute going on, then that’s your priority — you go to your most ill patients first. Not everybody we look after has had a heart attack. About a third have definitely had a heart attack, others have angina, a third again have pains unrelated to the heart — indigestion, pleurisy or muscle strain, things like that.

The sisters in coronary care in this hospital are on a G grade (£12,840 - £14,860). It does irritate you when you hear about people doing jobs with so much less responsibility for more money. You have to have a lot of knowledge and experience to do this job, and there are always new developments to keep up-to-date with.

I like people to accept me for what I am, and if I’ve got opinions about things I like the doctors to take notice. When they come in and say, ‘Hello, how’s Mr So-and-so?’, I like to think that the doctors will actually listen to what I’ve got to say after I’ve worked eight hours with a patient.

A good day is when you go home and think, I’ve really looked after the people well today, I’ve done everything I wanted to do, I’ve been able to devote time to see the patients, perhaps see the families. That’s a good day, when you go off feeling that you have done a good job and you have given the best that you can give. It does happen.