Meet the mental health nurses beginning their careers with young people in Sheffield

At a time of shortage in the mental health workforce nationally, Laura Reid speaks to two newly qualified nurses beginning their careers with adolescents in Sheffield.

Supporting young people with their mental health has become part of a day’s work for Stephanie Glossop and Bethanie Twigg, both based on child and adolescent wards at Sheffield’s Cygnet hospital.

The pair are two of seven mental health nurses who have recently embarked on a preceptorship programme at the site, a transition scheme that aims to support newly qualified nurses as they begin practising.

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For Stephanie, the position has seen her get to work on a unit for 12 to 18-year-olds, helping young people in need of support in an in-patient setting.

Mental health nurse Stephanie Glossop with her ward manager. Photo: Cygnet hospital SheffieldMental health nurse Stephanie Glossop with her ward manager. Photo: Cygnet hospital Sheffield
Mental health nurse Stephanie Glossop with her ward manager. Photo: Cygnet hospital Sheffield

“The patients often need a lot of support initially with their emotions and their behaviour,” the 31-year-old from Sheffield says.

“It can be challenging when a patient is in distress. Sometimes it can take a little while to redirect them and get them back to a more settled mental state. But on the flip side, when you deal with a patient like that and you’re the one able to talk to them and calm them and make them more settled, that’s really rewarding.”

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Bethanie, originally from Worksop, began studying mental health nursing at Leeds Beckett University three years ago, sparked by her own experiences.

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“I chose to go into the career due to my own prior struggles and desire to help people who may have been in similar situations,” she says. “It is my belief that we can use our own battles and traumas to help others.”

It is a “privilege”, she says, to be able to “give back”, a mindset she has applied since starting her Cygnet Sheffield preceptorship on an adolescent acute ward in September.

“I feel we are privileged to intervene at times when people are most vulnerable and suffering from soul destroying illnesses, but when you get to see your patients on their discharge day and see how far they have come, it is such an amazing feeling. I don’t think its right to take credit for that though, that’s on them.”

Being there through someone’s darkest times is both challenging and rewarding, she adds. “You can use all your knowledge and skills to support them through that, but vicarious trauma and burn-out are real things and as much as we are trained to deal with these intense emotions, us nurses are still human and we still feel things and they affect us.”

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Earlier this year, a British Medical Association report on the mental health workforce painted a worrying picture of shortages for the sector.

Demand within mental health services was rising, it said, but the workforce had seen little growth in the past ten years. The result? An impact on employee workload, wellbeing and morale, and on the ability for staff to provide good quality care.

The stigma around mental health “might” play a part in recruitment and retention issues, says Tom Griffiths, hospital manager at Cygnet Sheffield, which has partnerships with a number of universities in the hope of trying to address the national challenge.

He believes the trend may well be beginning to turn, particularly given the positive spotlight on nurses and healthcare staff more generally as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

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“What we do need to make sure is that [mental health] nurses are supported,” he says. “There’s no point going through a constant cycle of employing nurses coming into the profession and throwing them straight onto the wards without any support, whether that’s clinically or emotionally.

“Because it is a very highly intense environment being a mental health nurse, we need to support people to ensure they’re operating within their own competencies but we also need to make sure the whole workforce is emotionally okay to be there and in the right headspace. We’ve got a duty as much to our staff as to the people we look after.”

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