48 years and out…farewell and thank you to Helen Parfitt

Helen Parfitt was always going to be a nurse, right from the time she was in primary school and her mum was in hospital for 18 months.

And what a nurse she turned out to be! It was in 1976 when Helen first arrived in Taunton on her student nurse placement and it was at Musgrove Park Hospital where she fell in love with children’s nursing, inspired by then-ward sister, Mary Lawrence.

Helen went to complete an obstetric course at Queen’s Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital, one of the UK’s oldest maternity units, where she gained experience in midwifery, before undertaking her children’s nursing registration at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

“Going into nursing has been the single best decision of my life and, other than maternity leave, I’ve been at MPH for over 40 years, and I can’t believe the time has come to leave,” she says.

“After completing my training in London I returned to MPH to work on Ward 18, which is now Acorn ward, and it’s fair to say that so many things have changed for the better since then. For example, back then mothers used to sleep on camp beds next to the cot, so we had to be careful not to fall over them when we went in to do the observations at night!

“Babies died of meningitis in those days, but less so now that several vaccines are routine. Treatment has improved with cystic fibrosis too, with so many people with the condition living to adulthood, with some even having children of their own.

“I’m not old enough to have seen the beginning of penicillin, but there was great excitement when we gave the “new” Acyclovir anti-viral infusion.”

Helen then left the children’s ward to pursue her love of nurse teaching, and she set up our “Return to Practice” programme and induction course for overseas nurses to be registered in the UK.

She continues: “I also helped nurses to come back in the profession so if I ever felt guilty about leaving hands-on nursing, I was consoled with the fact that I’ve helped other people into it!

“For my Masters degree I chose ‘registered nurses use of infusion pumps’ because we needed to buy new ones. After testing four different makes on eight wards, my 18,000 word dissertation concluded that any of them were acceptable…we chose the simplest, which also happened to be the cheapest, so everyone was happy.

“Florence Nightingale once said, ‘first do the sick no harm’, and literally thousands of nurses did the dreaded calculations test as part of the IV drugs assessment. I would like to be remembered as supportive, as well as rigorous.”

It was in 2009 when Helen joined our pharmacy team as our first ever medicines management nurse.

Helen adds: “Early on in my time in pharmacy I helped design prescription charts for children’s pain relief and epidurals, adult acute pain, and variable rates of insulin infusion, and they are still being used today.

“After 40 years I dropped to four days a week and stopped being the “POD goblin” looking in the patient lockers to check the medicines there against the prescription sheet.

“The whole discharge from hospital process is usually pretty speedy, but it’s important that patients go home with the right drugs. Part of my role has been to look at incident reports to see what we can learn to reduce to risk of errors happening.

“Five years later I stopped teaching the IV course, but have been pleased to still be involved in a project to extend this role to our registered nursing associates. I would like to think I have done my bit and am leaving somewhere near the top of my game.

“I haven’t quite made my 50 years in the NHS as I did a degree in English Literature before I began my nursing career.

“Now I’ve left MPH I don’t have big plans to sail around the world, but I have started decluttering the house, as well as a bit of gardening. I’m just looking forward to enjoying life with a bit more time and space!”