For International Nurses Day (Sunday, 12 May) a senior BRHS nurse, Bek Hall, shares her family’s history with the health service, her career and what nursing might look like in the future.
Bek Hall says her family shaped her decision to get into nursing, but it’s her patients, the progress she’s seen over the years and the changes to come that keep her there.
Bek is the Nurse Unit Manager in Bairnsdale Regional Health Service’s Tambo ward, which combines medical, surgical and high dependency patients.
She qualified as a nurse in 2003 and in 2011 moved back to Bairnsdale and joined BRHS in 2011 after working in Melbourne and Perth hospitals.
Nursing, and BRHS, is a big part of Bek’s family history.
Her late grandmother Dawn Southon (left, below) worked at BRHS as a nurse from the late 1940s until the mid-‘90s.
Bek’s auntie Di Hathaway (right) worked at BRHS in the mid-1970s before heading to Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital.
Her mother Kim Hall was also a registered nurse, but not at BRHS. She worked locally in aged care and retired last year.
“Mum was a nurse for almost 50 years. She just retired 2 years ago to look after my children full time,” Bek said.
“I grew up listening to nursing talk around the table. I was destined to be a nurse, I think. We certainly had a lot to talk about. When I was learning, I was able to bounce things of my mum. When I was at uni, she gave me advice,” she said.
Bek left Bairnsdale to study nursing at university in 2000. Family drew her back. I came back when I had my first child. I came back to be around family, and it was much nicer and easier to work in a regional hospital when you live closer and you have family responsibilities as well,”: she said.
Taking care of patients brings great rewards, Bek said.
“I enjoy it because you get to make a difference sometimes. It’s so social. You get to talk to all different kinds of people. We see all types,” she said.
“Lots of people here know each other. I often meet people who knew my grandmother or know members of my family. There’s definitely a more personal community connection in Bairnsdale. Working in a smaller community, you’ve got something in common with patients.
“In Melbourne, it’s strangers from afar. It’s more fulfilling here because you’re able to give more person-centred care. It’s much more personal.”
The role of nurses has also become much broader in the time Bek has been in the profession, while working in a regional setting allows nurses a much more diverse range of clinical experiences.
“Nursing has expanded a lot. The responsibilities of nurses are greater. We do more things now that used to only be the job of doctors when I started,” she said.
“What’s different about Bairnsdale is the really broad range of conditions that you see, and it’s getting broader. Melbourne is more specialised, but in a regional area you see everything. I see more in Bairnsdale than I ever saw in a hospital ward in Melbourne.”
Modern nursing offers many opportunities now that Bek said she expects will grow in the future.
“The different career paths you can have has changed a lot over the years. You can specialise in so many areas and you can be a nurse practitioner now (a highly-trained nurse who, like a doctor, can also prescribe medications). That didn’t exist when I was a young nurse,” she said.
“Nurses perform procedures now that they weren’t able to do once. That increasing expansion into areas where nurses never used to be will continue.
“And I think technology will have a much bigger impact. I don’t know which way it will go. I can’t foresee that, but things like the introduction of electronic medical records was the start of us becoming a very technological workforce.”
