Return to Practice Network

Q1. What would motivate or encourage you to return to a permanent role in health or social care in the long term?

• Part time short hours but not frontline clinical.
• Job satisfaction role that allowed you to use your skills with ongoing training opportunities.
• Consistency in streamline application process alongside clear information.
• The ability to use the hours that I have worked during the pandemic towards revalidation.
• The recognition that attending a University return to practise course is unfeasible for many unless you live near to a University that offers this programme of learning.
• Respected as a professional for the experience that we bring and responsibilities that we hold.
• To be able to continue our registration without doing return to practise course.
• Salaries, terms and conditions that reflect experience and ability. Salaries and flexible working opportunities need to be more readily available.
• Leadership abilities need more recognition as does professionalism, seeing these things truly embraced and promoted.

Q2. What would prevent you from returning to a permanent role in the NHS or wider health and social care in the long term?

• Lack of respect, teamwork, flexibility or ongoing educational opportunities.
• Preference to work bank.
• Expectation that I can do everything at the same pace as those in practise full time.
• A failure to address fundamentals: safe staffing levels, expectations of staff, salaries, inflexible working. Parity with medical staff terms and conditions and salaries.
• Only permanent roles are advertised which means that those of us who have returned to practise are unable to apply as we are only on a temporary register.
• Having to bear the financial burden of re registration myself (£800 for an OSCE).
• The restrictions posed by the RTP university course.
• How inefficient and unimaginative the NHS can be.
• A continued failure to recognise the need for flexible working frustrations of inconsistent information and disjointed application processes.
• Lack of additional skills training for bank workers. Trust will pay for mandatory training but anything else is not supported I'm out of date with IV cannula care, bloods and central line care.
• I need fixed shifts to work around childcare.
• Having to pay for additional training makes the cost of revalidation expensive when you are a bank worker.

Q3. What additional skills and training would you need to feel confident to return to a post within health and social care long term?

• Training on the local computer system and having access as well!
• A designated mentor.
• Intravenous cannulation training.
• Wound management (there are different dressings to when I was practising).
• Central line care.
• Update around current practise related to pressure area assessment/care.
• The option of additional training opportunities medicine management.
• Wound management training.
• A preceptorship style return.
• Pharmacology day.
• Really all the basics that you see: admit, start care and discharge a patient that is Trust specific as half the battle is getting to grips with realms of unfamiliar paperwork

Q4. What Would your ideal future role look like (blue sky thinking)?

• Working bank is my only option to fit around my family life or term time contracts.
• I have no real plans as to what my future looks like as a nurse as long as I am a nurse.
• A band five bank would suit me, without the pressures of being in charge.
• To be a regular bank nurse for a group of wards/units that are somewhat similar or work together (A&E/urgent care/MAU, surgical wards), for example my upper GI ward skills transferred well to lower GI and urology surgical wards.
• A fixed hour in one or two wards or units.
• The familiarity of wards to ensure I wasn't consistently starting again each shift but also the ability to swap when I needed a change and to also enable me not to get caught up in the inevitable Ward politics!
• My perfect job would be urgent care or A&E with fixed or annualised hours.
• Senior leadership in management executive role to be proudly held accountable, being able to shape and influence change a solution champion.
• A patient safety role.
• Supporting new chief nurses - I was previously a chief nurse; did it twice and learned so much.

Useful comments worth noting

• Consistently the returners spoke of how they could as experienced nurses working on the shop floor alongside the junior and newly qualified nurses be able to share tips and tricks of the trade; give psychological support at peer level which could contribute to preventing burnout in the new generation of nurses. I guess it's role modelling but with very experienced nurses.
• We don't feel like retired people get a chance to offload all their experience before stopping all NHS work. Return to practise would be a good way of supporting the next generation of nurses.
• We have such a wealth of experience in so many different areas plus there is a chronic shortage of nurses. Why aren't we being welcomed back in more appropriate ways?
• Additional skills and training are such an individual question; it is totally dependent on each return to practise nurse. It would be great if each workplace had a specific practise development nurse just for returners or experienced staff, but they would have to be available to bank staff too. Then each nurse could develop their own training needs analysis in line with experience and where they are choosing to work. There also needs to be a realisation that many of us are motivated to do our own learning too and that we don't necessarily need to sit in a Trust powerpoint lecture to prove we know something.