From Receptionist to Treatment Room nurse – a Primary Care success story

From Receptionist to Treatment Room nurse: Jodie Roycroft is a success story in ‘growing your own team’ in general practice. A combination of funding from the government and St. Austell Healthcare enabled Jodie to complete her training and fulfil her ambition to become a qualified nurse. She now has her sights set on becoming matron!

Rosie Brown from the Kernow Health Communications Team visited Jodie at work to find out more about her journey. Watch her story here...

Jodie started work with St. Austell Healthcare as a receptionist in 2015, before being approached to become a healthcare assistant. “I've always been passionate about healthcare”, Jodie told me, from behind the now very familiar light blue mask. And so she jumped at the chance to increase her skillset, subsequently being promoted to senior healthcare assistant in 2018.

Reaching the limit in career progression as a healthcare assistant, Jodie wasn’t in a position financially to take on the three-year adult nursing degree, complete with loans and the loss of her monthly wage. But her employer, St. Austell Healthcare, stepped in to support Jodie through the training - along with government funding - with the understanding that Jodie would return to work for them after the course was complete.

I followed Jodie to the treatment room she had been assigned for the day. The door had her name on the front, with the word ‘nurse’ alongside. A recent graduate from Plymouth University, Jodie now has ambitions to complete a masters programme, a prescribing course and one day - in the not-to-distant future - to become matron.

As we recount stories from her training days on the wards, I asked her why General Practice? “I love General Practice, just because you get to build the relationship with patients… especially on different clinics , like dressing clinics where the patients come in once or twice a week, you just get to build the relationship with them and then they recognise you by name.”

“I just think you know if your heart's in it for General Practice and mine definitely is,” she continued. But Jodie explained that opportunities to have nurse training funded are hard to come by. “Within General Practice, it's not really there… it's just not reliable. But for me, I think General Practice would really benefit from it, especially in Cornwall, because you get to build your own nurse, your own treatment room, your own practitioners. So, I think it's definitely something that needs to change in general practice.”

As I finished our interview, Jodie received a call from reception that a patient needed seeing. I asked her finally, what does she love about being a nurse? “It's just making that little bit of a difference to somebody's life.”

To find out more about funding and training opportunities, contact out workforce team: kernowhealthcic.workforce@nhs.net