On International Nurses Day, Michelle Beaumont, Project Manager with our Alliance Living With and Beyond Cancer team, talks about her role as an award-winning Clinical Nurse Specialist and how her experiences and values as a specialist nurse are translating into her current role.
Michelle is well known to many from her work as a Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS)/Nurse Consultant with the Macmillan Head and Neck team at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust. She scooped the Trust’s Celebrating Excellence Award for Leader of the Year in 2015, while her team triumphed in the ‘We Work Together To Get Results’ category. Here's what she had to say......
“Being a CNS and part of a Macmillan Head and Neck cancer team, my role was to ensure the patients and carers received all the support, information and time they needed to make difficult decisions about their care.
“People don’t want to enter our healthcare world; it's alien to them and we presume they can navigate around it and understand the words we take for granted. Clinical Nurse Specialists support and inform them at an extremely stressful time.
“The role of the CNS changed over the 13 years I was in post, with increasing numbers of new diagnoses and from a younger age group; increasing complexity of treatments; short and long term consequences of the treatments, and patients living longer after a cancer diagnosis, meaning different ways of working to ensure an exemplary service for our patients.
“The job of the CNS is to lead on advancing practice, service improvement, changes to the workforce, and fundamentally ensuring any changes are patient led and will improve their experience and outcomes. The best part of the role is when you know you have done everything to help your patients and team, whether that’s discharging them at their last appointment, or making sure you have enabled them to make the right choices for themselves and their families, so they have the best quality of life possible.
“I’m excited about my role with the Cancer Alliance as it means I can use the experience I’ve gained and the values I’ve held throughout my work as a CNS to influence transformation on a wider scale and help to deliver improvements in the quality of life for patients and others affected by cancer.
“Happy International Nurses Day to all our nursing colleagues and their teams.”
