Zoë O’Reilly

Community Learning Disability Nurse, Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust

I will be joining a team of community learning disability nurses based in south Norfolk. It’s an integrated team with social services and they hybrid work out of the same office. Due to current hybrid working, staff may not see each other face to face for periods of time. The team visit service users and their carers to assist with the referral, ranging from behaviour of concern to sexual health advice and more. The team at current appears to be spit fairly equally with some nurses having a decade or two of experience and others being in their first 5 years of qualifying.

I think the fellowship and supporting programme will allow the team to have further peer to peer support and connect with each other. This in turn, allows the team to learn about others’ passions and interests, which will ensure service users are receiving tailored information by knowing who to have professional discussions with.

I would personally like to introduce informal reflective practice sessions with true life case studies and also small vignettes to consider how each person would approach a situation. For example, I know from experience and discussion that I focus more on extrinsic factors that could be causing concern and often consider intrinsic factors secondary due to my previous workplace.