Hi, thank you for coming and yeah, it’s a beautiful day. So thank you for coming and not going on the nature walk, that’s really appreciative. So I’m gonna talk to you a bit today about my career journey because it’s been slightly different than that of a normal ODP. So originally I started my career in 96, as a student nurse, I was a project 2000 nurse and I hated it. I spent 18 months not really seeing patients I had placements in schools and various other places, but never really in the job that I felt I was supposed to go into. Being a typical student, I had quite an active social life, so I had to supplement my income. So I worked as a healthcare assistant on some of the wards in a couple of the local hospitals. I was then given an opportunity to have a shift in the operating theatre absolutely fantastic, had a great time and decided actually that I’d much rather do that than become a ward nurse. I enjoyed the environment and the way people worked, I just thought that was fantastic. So I applied for my ODP training back in Plymouth and I was rejected on the first attempt, so I thought right I’ll find another way around it so I got a job as a nursing auxiliary in theatres, working in general surgical theatres I learned so much. I had a really good mentor and one of the jobs she sent me was she sent me to the sterile store and said find this, this, this, this and this, it took me about half an hour, but I found it, but they didn’t send me for a tin of tartan paint or a fallopian tube, so it’s it’s all fine so. After my and then my second attempt I applied for ODP training and was successful. So during that time the ODP training was very vocational. It was before it went into academia, so before it was transferred into university. We had kind of the best of both worlds because we had the academic part of it where we had to write as though we were doing the diploma, but we also had the element of the vocational side. So our first few weeks we had six weeks in packed in, in the classroom. Then we had two weeks in placement and then we went into six weeks surgery, six weeks anaesthetics, and the hospital I was in, we were very, very lucky in that we had every surgical specialty apart from liver transplants. So I did a little bit of everything. I qualified and then decided to specialise in anaesthetics and for the most part I did mainly neurosurgery. Only girl in neurosurgery, so all the Catheterizations ended up my way, so I was always called for a catheter in neuro. I then got married my husband at the time was in the military, so I was lucky enough to be offered a year’s contract as a locum Addenbrookes, again specialising just in neurosurgery, so three theatre unit, absolutely amazing. So much experience and it was a big trauma centre as well, so had lots of experiences. I then came back-to-back to Plymouth again, stayed in neurosurgery but unfortunately, I was diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder. Ended up with spinal surgery and then could no longer work in theatres. I couldn’t manage the manual handling and it wasn’t safe for me to be in that environment because sometimes you were lone working and it just wasn’t safe. So it was put through the redeployment process and if anyone has ever had to try and work through a redeployment process, it’s not great. It happened that I bumped into a colleague who I knew from my training actually, she was the pre OP assessment sister. I’d worked with her in day case theatres. A little bit of a chat and she said oh God, I want an ODP and pre op makes absolute perfect sense. That was the. Easy part. The next part was trying to convince the matron, actually, that an ODP could work in pre-op assessment. So that was like a red rag to a bull. Out came My Portfolio. OK, this is what we have to do, I’ve had to do assessments and I can assess somebody’s fitness for surgery. So I spent a long time doing that and that was when I first came across research nurses so they’d come down to our department to recruit patients into some of the surgical studies, so some of them were randomised controlled trials, some of them were observational studies. So I had conversations with the research nurses and then I ended up having one of the infamous corridor conversations which are always the best conversations and you find out the most information with these and she said to me go and do your ICHGCP training and come and spend a day with the team. So I did that, spent a day with the team and just fell in love with research and the way it was working and the fact that you got to spend some time with your patients because as a ODP you don’t get to spend that much time with your patients, so. I applied for a job and was told categorically no, you can’t apply for the job because you’re ODP and it’s for nurses only. So I might have had another conversation with one of our lead anaesthetists in pre op at the time who was very, very research active who then went and had a chat with the lead research nurse who then asked me to go to a meeting, have a chat and said we are going to be advertising a band 5 role. Would you be interested? Oh absolutely, that’s where I want to go, I’ll go and go and do that. So while we’re waiting for the NHS recruitment process to go through, I was doing some additional hours doing some data collection on some of the non interventional studies going through patients notes and just really going through the processes of how to collect data for research purposes obviously applied for the job, was successful and was given a band 5 role looking after the surgical and anaesthetic portfolio. So we had lots of studies, some of it was observational, some of it was interventional, looking at different fluids the way fluids were managed, interoperative emergency surgery and randomising between open and laparoscopic esophagectomy. So a real broad, broad range of study. So we’re very, very lucky that we’ve got a real, our clinical director was an anaesthetist so he was very forward thinking and brought lots of studies to us. He also set up a trainee research network so for new trainee anaesthetists, we were involved in that and because of the some of the studies that we had done with them. We recruited 300/400 patients in a week. I was very tired by the end of that, but it was really, really great and because of the collaboration across the peninsula with this research network, we actually won a BMJ award for anaesthesia team of. So that was a brilliant, brilliant accolade for all of the work that got put in and that we had representation from across the peninsula and it was the clinicians but it was also the research nurses and the practitioners, because we all know that the research nurses and the practitioners do the work and the doctors will take the accolade for it? That’s how research works. But what was fantastic is it gave me a really good grounding and then I decided I wanted a new challenge and a senior role came up. So I moved across to work in neurology. So again, working in still in research, but looking after the degenerative neurology portfolio. So it’s mainly with patients with Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease, little bit of brain tumour work as well, but a broad a broad range of patients for brilliant all my neurosurgical expertise will come to the fore. It was a bit of a shock to the system because I had to learn about tau tangles and protein buildup in the brain and alpha synuclein and the basal ganglia. Yeah, it was a bit of a shock to the system I’m not gonna lie, but it was fantastic and I got the opportunity to set up studies, work through from feasibility right through to archiving. I did that for a few years. Unfortunately, the pandemic kind of put a bit of a kibosh on a lot of the studies. But then COVID came and the team was kind of fragmented a little bit. Some people had to go home and shield. Some people were moved to the hospital and were worked on the wards ICU team tried to take me to ICU. Our lead nurse wouldn’t let him, wouldn’t let them, and then I was working in doing the COVID studies, so worked on the COVID wards. So my manager even now she will say I’ve never seen anybody be so comfortable in a mask, a gown or head gear wandering around the ward, she said. I’m sweating, thinking about to expire, she said. You’re wandering around having a lovely time, but that was fantastic because we bought new treatments to the field and now patients who do have to come into hospital, unfortunately with COVID, get the treatments that we trialled back in 2020. So the back end of 2020, we were moving more towards COVID vaccine studies and then I was offered a secondment as a team leader. So that was a really interesting role and a huge step up from a 6 to a 7 it was a massive step I’ll be honest, I don’t think I appreciated the step from a 6 to a 7 it was huge. So then I got I had to leave my own team so I was involved in the budget negotiations and the planning of all of the studies right down to actually how much are we going to get paid for each little intervention, so that that took a lot of, a lot of learning, shall we say lots of learning, but it’s fantastic. I’ve got a really good team that I work with they are absolutely amazing and it’s a mix of allied healthcare professionals, nurses, assistant practitioners and healthcare assistants. So we’ve got a little bit of a mix trying to bring more AHP into it, but again it’s that making it known that AHP’s can work in research, it’s not just purely nurse led, can be tricky sometimes, but we are we’re getting there slowly. So I also now I sit on the Parkinson’s disease clinical specialty clinical studies group, so clinicians will present studies to this group and then as a group we decide whether we take them forward, whether we identify new investigators from that and then as because I’m a specialist in research delivery, I can advise whether or not we feel that protocol is suitable and whether or not it can be delivered and if any tweaks need to be made to the protocol. Sitting on that group, they’ve also, I was also involved with the new national contract value review and because I deliver it and I can assess Parkinson’s, I can tell you how long it takes to do each assessment. If it’s an advanced Parkinson’s, it will take a little bit longer than if it’s, if it’s not so advanced. And one of my team’s biggest achievements was a new drug that has just been licenced was licenced in October of last year, but it’s a subcutaneous levodopa infusion so if patients have got Parkinson’s they don’t get the big motor fluctuations, the big changes, so it just keeps them at a bit of an even keel. So we were the biggest site in the UK, we had five participants, so the drug company now use myself and my team to advise other areas of the big neuroscience centres to just to give them advice and work with the nurse specialists as well to make sure that the patients are all happy and ticking along on the medication which they are now, which is fantastic. So yeah, so I’ve had a bit of a, a varied career, a bit of a change had to fight for some of it as well had to have lots of conversations and like, please will you change job description please? Can I apply for this job? I was very lucky that the lead research nurse and some of the senior team leaders were willing to listen and to look at the skills that I had and said well actually yeah, you can do that standing on your head it’s not a problem at all. So yeah, you can do it if you want to, and if you’ve got somebody that will listen and take on your skills. So there we are, thank you. OK.