Celine Sprey's story:

Celine was excited to start on her placement at Blind Veteran's UK and said of her mentor Senior Staff Nurse Patrick McBride "Patrick has been brilliant and patient, at the heart of the placement was ensuring my learning outcomes were achieved."

Celine explains that through supervised working alongside the nursing team of trained nurses and health care assistants, she was able to achieve a good grounding in basic care skills.  Especially she reflected the importance of having learning opportunities, skills and insights that enabled her to learn how to care for patients who have total care needs.  While also gaining valuable knowledge about medications and their administration.

Celine commented that she "appreciated being able to spend time really getting to know some of our patients especially those who are unable to receive regular visits from relatives" while being cared for at our Brighton Centre.  Celine noted that in a hospital or usual care home setting - people might be at risk of isolation due to their visual impairment, while staff at Blind Veteran's UK go out of their way to ensure that high quality care is offered alongside social activities and volunteer befriending programme.

Celine was also really struck by the rehabilitation and training services available for members of the Charity, including independent living skills, ranging from safe orientation using cane work, kitchen skills, computer training and others - and especially some that you wouldn't normally associate with people with visual impairment, like acoustic rifle shooting, swimming and bowls. 

Celine's next training placement is nursing in the community, and on completion of the Nursing Degree would like to work in Accident and Emergency/Trauma. 

Alison Rapley's story: 

 

At first Alison was quite nervous and didn't know what to expect, from her research about Blind Veteran's UK, a friend had mentioned that the building was the shape of an aeroplane, though that seemed not much use for studying nursing!  On her first day, all the nursing staff were very friendly and welcoming and if I had a problem, there was always someone to ask and to turn to for help.  Alison says "my mentor Maxine was very helpful and always organised the best learning opportunities for me. I had the chance to shadow the work of all of the nurses, to gain the best experiences of nursing.  The nursing team are all very dedicated and skilled so felt privileged to be a part of the team."  As a first learning placement, she developed basic nursing skills, including maintenance of catheters and feeding tubes, as well as developing communication skills with residents and working as part of a multi-disciplinary team.  Alison said "I think that the care the patients receive at Blind Veteran's UK is brilliant. The staff are very positive and encouraging when interacting with patients, and the quality of the care is an excellent example for a student nurse to follow".

Alison found the range of daily activities impressive by providing assistance to enable members to stay in touch with and explore the outside world.  Excellent facilities are available to help assist keeping members busy and interested. "I was fortunate to spend two days with the rehab and training department to see first-hand the resources available to facilitate members to promote aspects of everyday independence that sighted people take for granted. The ways that people with visual impairment can be assisted to adapt and maintain independent lives is fascinating."

One of the most moving experiences was talking to patients about their experiences of serving in wars - and said of those "I'm sure I will remember those stories for a long time."

Like Celine, my next placement is within the community, most likely with a district nurse, so will be different from a clinical setting.  Looking to the future I'm interested in being an A&E nurse or a district nurse, but will decide once I have more experience in different areas.

 Alison reflected comically from her experience in the rehabilitation and training department, "I tried archery and acoustic rifle shooting and found that the visually impaired people in the group were much better than me - I won't give up my day job yet!"

We would like to wish Celine and Alison every success in their future training and nursing careers. 

Brighton Centre

Contact details for Blind Veterans UK Brighton.

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