ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

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Valerie Retton, or Nurse Val, is the friendly face of health care. Any of you who have had a sore throat, a sexual health need or any minor ailments at all may be familiar with Nurse Val already, but for those of you who aren't, here is a lowdown on the good nurse herself...

We provide a lot of different services here at the Health Centre. We do tend to lean towards concentrating on sexual health and contraception, but we do lots of other things as well. We have an osteopath and a dermatologist come in - they can deal with lots of problems which students might have. We do lots and lots of travel health - immunisations, travel advice etc - by the way, we'd like people to come and see us about these sorts of things sooner than they do; lots of people do leave it till the last minute. We also do 'stop smoking' classes once a week. It is hard to tell how successful these groups are, but so far I have had one person who's stopped out of every group, which is actually quite good.

In term time, there is always a nurse in the sick bay. People can use the sick bay if they are sick enough not to be able to look after themselves very well, but not ill enough to be in hospital. A lot of people come with really bad sore throats, flu or just generally feeling bad - maybe if they were at home they'd be fine because they'd have someone to look after them, but if they're by themselves, they feel miserable. It's also a safe place to go for people who are feeling depressed or have exam worries etc. It can be very lonely on campus, and in the sick bay there's always someone to be nice to you - you can just sit with them and have a chat and make them a cup of tea and they'll feel better.

We do a lot of first aid on campus. We've definitely had some dangerous moments when we've had to use first aid - we've got a defibrulator and a cardiac arrest team. Usually we have to use them about twice a term. We've been called out when somebody fell out of a window and I was called out when East Slope caught fire. We cover a lot of women's health too - smear tests and so on. We probably spend about half our time doing contraception. So as you can see, I don't really have an average day, although about 30% of the things I see are colds and sore throats. We have a system here where people with minor complaints, see a nurse first, and then if we think they're iller than they ought to be we send them to a doctor. It is an increasing trend to leave the minor complaints to the nurse, and we have four doctors and four full time nurses. As well as all the different complaints we see on a day-to-day basis, there is a seasonal variation - at the moment there is loads of asthma and flu, and towards the end of the summer it's all travel - people here don't just pop off for two weeks, we've got a big range of immunisation needs and it's terribly complicated. We have really up-to-date information though because the computer here is linked to the net and there is a medical site we can access which tells us the most recent information on immunisation practice.

I worked in Casualty before - I was on duty the night the Grand got bombed - and this is a lot better than that. I did think it might be boring here after Casualty, but actually it's not, it's just sort of different - people don't bleed everywhere. This is a really nice place to work, and it's so much better when the population of the practice as a whole are both fit and intelligent. It makes my job a whole lot easier.

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Friday 13th November 1998

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