My Working Day: Cathy Fuller is the director of nursing at the Whitfield Clinic Medical Centre, a private clinic that will open in Waterford on November 1st.
I trained as a nurse in the early 1980s and my background is accident and emergency and orthopaedics. I also ran a restaurant and pub in Britain in the Cotswolds for two years, then my husband and I moved to Ireland just over a year ago.
I came over here without a job, not knowing what my next project would be, and then along came the Whitfield Clinic.
We're a private hospital, we'll have 40 inpatient beds and 24 day-surgery beds and a radiology department, and we will be carrying out elective surgical procedures.
General surgery could be simple things such as a hernia repair or a removal of a lump or a bump, down to major abdominal surgery or a hip replacement.
We are also working in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre and they are carrying out radiotherapy for cancer patients. It's very much going to be a developing business.
My day starts around 7.30am. The facility is still under construction, so we have builders on site and we are working out of temporary offices.
I work very much from a to-do list. I look at it and see what the priorities are.
Recruitment is top of the agenda so I take stock of where we are at and make sure the documents have gone out to the relevant people, references are being sent in and we are having criminal record checks done.
We are hoping to be something that bit different. We want to offer a five-star standard service to our patients, so we want to create a team where it is not about numbers.
We want to get the right people on board. We've looked both in Ireland and overseas but we have concentrated our focus on Ireland. We've had applications through people just sending in their CVs because they have seen the building being constructed and they thought it would be worth putting it in.
We have also placed local and national ads and are working with recruitment agencies. And we set up a contact with irishjobs.ie - we have had a tremendous response from that.
We have looked at what's out there and tried to encompass everything.
I will be working on the wards. I feel it's very important as director of nursing to be clinically beside staff as much as I can to make sure that standards are being maintained and that there's an element of training and education there too.
I'm really looking forward to that - it's something that I love and I think we have a tremendous opportunity here, a blank canvas. I never thought I would get this opportunity in a million years.
We have two consultants who are beginning to schedule patients so it's going to happen. It's very exciting and I feel very privileged to be part of this.
Time has flown - I started in March and I can't believe it's the last month before we open. It has been challenging but overall it's fantastic, I love it.
There will be a great sense of achievement for all of us when November 1st comes.