The day is just beginning at St James's Hospital on Dublin's south side. Staff nurse Sarita Cronley comes on to the acute surgical ward at 8 a.m., bright, brisk and smiling. She's wearing navy trousers, navy shoes and a blue tunic top. In her pocket, she carries a scissors, a pen torch, a small clamp and a couple of pens.
"It can be emotionally draining but you have to put your best into it every day," she says. "It's an extremely demanding job." Her first job on the ward is to wash those patients who can't wash themselves. Some of her cancer patients may have had bad news the day before.
"They count on the nurse to talk to them; to give them psychological care. You have to be positive," says Cronley, who can't pin down the exact time when she first began to dream about becoming a nurse. It may have been knowing her aunt Lucy, who is nurse, but by Leaving Cert year at St Joseph's Secondary School in Rochfortbridge in Co Westmeath she had decided what she wanted to do.
"It was my lifetime ambition to be a nurse," she says. She did voluntary work during the summer holidays working in a nursing home near home in Kinnegad, Co Westmeath, to gain an insight into the profession.
"I knew at that time that to get into nursing you had to have some experience," she says. Nursing, she says, is a "very giving" profession. "You have to be in good form. You have to get on well with people. You have to be responsible, empathetic, patient. You have to be a good communicator; you are dealing with people every day, and if you can get on with patients they trust you more."
She started her training at St James's Hospital in November 1994. While she waited for this month to roll around, she worked in Clonskeagh Hospital as a cadet nurse. She worked with elderly patients who had Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and cerebral vascular accidents (strokes). Thinking back, she recalls wanting "to look after the patients properly and fully" and being anxious to begin her training. As a cadet nurse she was not able to give out drugs or take responsibility.
There were 41 girls in her group when she started the "traditional training" course to complete a three-year certificate programme. At the start, being part of the healthcare team, working on wards where patients were suffering from a range of problems was "strange". "I had never seen an amputation. It was a big eye-opener. The staff nurses on the ward made sure that we were all right and that we knew what was going on."
As students they were continually assessed both clinically and academically, she says. "Yes", she agrees, "there's a lot of study". The most interesting and enjoyable part of the course was the time she spent working in the Coombe hospital. "I loved that." She returns to study midwifery as a post-registered nurse next March. During her training she also spent time studying areas such as paediatrics, psychology, maternity and public health nursing. "You get a good insight into nursing. It gives you a chance to see what areas that you do like." She sat her final exams in November 1997.
After finishing her training, she went to Romania and worked as a volunteer nurse in an orphanage while waiting for her results to come through. "My training in James's did help me cope. Working with children who were physically and mentally handicapped was really tough but nurse training applies to everybody," she explains.
On her return she joined the staff of St James's, and in spite of all the pain that she witnesses in her job every day and the long hours, she says: "I still love it. I love it absolutely. Of course you have very good days and bad days."
