Working as a Healthcare Assistant

So I have written a post about how I am working as a healthcare assistant at Bristol, but haven't followed this up with anything really on my blog. I have been doing this job properly now for around eight months and am loving it more and more, shift after shift.

The best thing about being a HCA is that you are learning so much about patients that lectures just cannot deliver. The lectures at uni are all about the physiology and scientific aspect of different diseases and conditions. You can learn about congestive heart failure down to the cytokine, but it presents itself differently in every individual.

Working as a HCA, I have met so many patients. Each of them completely unique in their own way - with the way they wanted their care delivered, the way they view their disease and their own prognoses.

I am also learning lots of practical skills. I actually found that I am becoming more confident in the way I speak with patients and help them out. At the beginning, I found myself quite reluctant to touch and get hands-on with my patients, and I think this was down to the fear of hurting or harming the patient. Now, I am much more confident. I can knock on the door loudly before entering and introduce myself with a smile (and not mess up my introductory lines!). I am yet to get to the level of the other HCAs I work with, but I'm hoping that will come with time.

As I now have a long summer ahead of me, I'm working as many bank shifts as possible. Not only am I earning money whilst doing so, but I'm keeping my head in the medical world so I won't get a shock in September when I start my year in Taunton's hospital!

Summary of Year 1

Let's do an overall summary of Year 1...

• I arrived at university and met my flatmates. I had to make all new friends from my course and my student accommodation, who thankfully remained by my side throughout the whole year!
• I did house viewings and decided on my accommodation flat for next year!
• I learnt soooo much! From anatomy, to law, to sociology, to ethics, to histology, to biomedicine to biochemistry! There has been so much content on each individual system in the body which you can't help but feel excited to turn up to lectures.
• I have handled a lot of cadaver specimens and have been exposed prematurely to death. I have also taken part in shadowing a pathologist during a post mortem.
• I have taken part in clinical shadowing at GPs, where I did some clinical skills and did individual home visits. Here, I learnt how important communication is when it comes to talking to patients.
• I have also shadowed doctors at Southmead Hospital and have been taught by both patients and the teaching fellows about body systems and some clinical skills - such as taking blood pressure, blood glucose levels, auscultation and palpation.
• I completed an essay project, as well as an art project. This is based on medicine being both a science and an art.
• I have worked as HCA as part of the course, where I worked four shifts of 7 hours and one 12 hour shift.
• I loved being a HCA so much, I then went on to apply for a job as a healthcare assistant in Bristol. I went for the interview and then received my job offer. I then attended the training and now awaiting some shifts to sign up to!
• I have completed my exams, January and Summer and passed to progress into Year 2!

I can't believe how much I feel I know ever since starting just less than a year ago!

Year 1 has been filled with some very exciting moments and I have enjoyed every second of university life. You are so independent and have so much fun which is incomparable to any other experience I have ever had! I would say I would love to do it again, but I'm really excited to go into Year 2!

I hope all of your exams go well and you receive the results you both want and deserve. Have a great summer, and I will speak to you in September if not before!

Training as a HCA

Exams are now behind me, so I have been busy concentrating on my HCA role!

I had the pleasure of going to Southmead Hospital to undergo my beginning training as a healthcare assistant. I was lucky to be told that I only needed to attend the first day of the five-day induction because I was a medical student.

Looking at the programme, the first few induction training sessions were about patient safety, hygiene, human factors in the delivery of care and the importance of communication and rules of social media. Other days involved safeguarding, dementia etc - which I had already experienced when being introduced as a HCA for placements here in December!

The beautiful Southmead Hospital!

The training was delivered in a lecture theatre in the Academy. I was sat with other healthcare assistants, student nurses, porters and domestics who were also just starting their jobs.

The training was very informative and was a great opportunity to revisit things I had forgotten since December! I collected my uniform and have received a new ID badge (which I can keep alongside my medical student one!) so it feels all so real now!

I am waiting for the actual starting date to which I can sign up for bank shifts now.

Cheeky coffee and bacon butty for the journey to Bristol!

I was supposed to be attending manual handling the following Tuesday but this was last minute cancelled. Therefore, I'm waiting for this to be rearranged and then I will fill you in again with how that was!

Getting the job as a HCA!

Prior to finishing this term, I had to complete some more hospital shifts as a healthcare assistant. During my week, I had the opportunity to work on the ward for complex needs. This allowed me to develop experience working with patients with high dependence and little or no independence at all. The majority of my shift involved taking observations and speaking with the patients and nurses, or helping patients feed or go to the toilet.

On break...with a disgusting cold cup of coffee...

I have recently really enjoyed working as a healthcare assistant so decided to apply for the job at the hospital as a Band 2 Healthcare Assistant - which I am happy to say I got the job! It could possibly mean I could stop commuting to my hometown to work in my retail store (where I have been working now for three years) and live permanently in my new city and work at the hospital there.

In this article, I'll describe some of the questions I was asked in my group interview regarding working at the hospital as a healthcare assistant...

• Why do you want to become a Healthcare Assistant? What are you currently doing?
• Have you had an experience which demonstrates your excellence in quality of care you deliver?
• Have you had an experience which demonstrates your respect for the patient and their dignity?
• What characteristics should a Healthcare Assistant have? What characteristics have you listed, do you demonstrate? (And provide some examples)

I also had to take part in a 30 minute numeracy paper and a 30 minute literacy paper in the assessment centre.

I got the results two days later, saying my job offer is conditional on a reference from my current line manager which was successful!

All of the nurses I have worked with have said that the perfect doctors have been healthcare assistants once in their life. Apparently, it creates great doctors who sympathise with the rest of the team and respect all the staff on the ward as you understand everyone's role, stresses and job role. This reduces the chance of a "pretentious doctor walking down the ward like they're better than everyone else."

Drift to Shifts!

Stress from the exams are now in the past and now I drift to concentrating on my shifts as a healthcare assistant on the ward of a hospital I have been allocated to.

That is the best thing about the course structure at the university I'm studying at, we have the opportunity so early in the year to be exposed to the work on the ward! We have completed the training and the induction in December before we broke up for Christmas, which meant we learned many important skills for working in the hospital as a HCA. This included how to make a bed, the importance of safeguarding, what is dementia and the correct communication skills required.

I have had two shifts at the hospital I am in, working as a HCA. I am on the Stroke/Neurology ward, where I helped care for patients who have had strokes or suffer from neurological diseases.

I'm trying to work out the best way of writing this post without writing a long chunky essay that's saturated with paragraphs. Therefore, I'm going to break it up into the typical cheesy questions you usually get on a feedback form that school gives you:

What was it like working as a HCA for the first time?

• Very different, it is nothing like volunteering at all!
• As a HCA, you are allowed to handle patients where you have completed manual handling training. This is different to volunteering, which means you are allowed to help move patients from beds to chairs, help move them into comfortable positions or help manoeuvre patients while they are being cleaned.
• It is true, as a HCA you do help clean patients who may have soiled themselves or need aid in their daily washing routine. I didn't actually realise this was the case until I was on the ward.

What did I enjoy?

• It was probably the most "doctor"y I've felt so far in the course ... and ever!
• I did enjoy helping the nurses take observations of patients and learning how information is collated, kept and stored in the hospital setting in more interesting.
• In a way, you did feel a sense of reward after you have cleaned up a patient as they were grateful and you could now see they were happier and more comfortable. This is what made the cleaning job.

What were the challenges I faced?

• I will make it clear for you, as a volunteer you are not expected to handle body fluids at all. I know in my training as a volunteer, I was told that if a bed was soiled I wasn't allowed to touch it. As a HCA, you are exposed to the different body fluids. In my shifts, I cleaned up vomit, faeces and urine - but in my opinion thinking about it is definitely worse than when you're actually doing it. And you'll realise that. It isn't that much of a great deal and you do adapt to it after a while.
• As a volunteer, I found myself speaking mostly with the nurses and the other volunteers as we made the teas and distributed the meals. After this, I was sterilising medical equipment or help cleaning the ward. As a HCA, you are more patient-facing, meaning you do see pain and discomfort on a greater level. You are in situations that do make you feel uncomfortable, I was saddened by the news on my later shift to how one patient I had became close to and exchanged great chat and laughs with had unfortunately died the morning of my next shift.
• You do feel quite nervous when you are allowed to carry out observations on patients. For example, one nurse let me carry out a pupil examination on a patient, where I would shine my torch into their eyes to hopefully see a change in pupil size as a response to the bright light. I will admit, my hand was shaking as I did it. You are nervous, but by the end of the week I was more confident and did it more 'naturally' if you like.
• The long hours?? In fairness, as I groaned about the seven hours I was enduring, the nurses laughed as they were doing the hardcore twelve hours! You do need to realise that the shifts are long, and that there isn't always something to do. But it gives a great opportunity to speak with other members of the team or learn from patients.

Working as a HCA, it was interesting to observe how the ward was structured. I found that the healthcare assistants and the nurses were the main members of the multi-disciplinary team on the ward who were responsible for the primary care of the patients (providing comfort, meds etc) and recording the observations. The doctors made brief appearances throughout the day, analysing the observations and speaking with nurses about the progress or reviewing medication. This was quite an eye-opening observation, as you learn how the 7 or 8 patients that the nurses and HCAs are allocated each means they have more time with the patients so more of a presence, whereas the doctors could have around 30-40 patients on this ward, the next ward and maybe another ward in the hospital so their encounters with these patients can be more confined and brief.

Working four hours, I was dying for this cup of tea!

The nurses I was working with were absolutely amazing. When there was nothing to do, the nurse went through my handover sheet with me and explained the conditions to me. For example, she explained what a "thrombectomy" is and what "abx" means on the sheet. So I would recommend that as you complete your shift work (if you do it), do speak with your nurses and gain a better understanding of the patients you are dealing with and you can apply this knowledge to your studies!

The best thing about working as a HCA though is that when you're talking to a nurse about yourself, you're no longer saying "I hope to go to university and study medicine" as you did whilst volunteering, you're saying "I AM at university STUDYING medicine"! The dream has come true!