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Q: Tell us about your job

I am the Quality Assurance (QA) manager for paediatric haematology and oncology. The main part of my role is to manage and maintain the quality management programme for the department, which we use to ensure the standards set by national and international bodies are achieved to ensure the service is of a suitable quality and presents no avoidable risk to our patients. I also help our lead nurse to oversee the risk register, keep our intranet pages shipshape, and promote quality improvement projects in the department.

Q: What do you like most about your job?

I may be the only QA manager in my team, but without the rest of my team there would be no QA to manage, and no job for me!

I get to spend quite a lot of my time working together with colleagues to improve the documents that the nurses and doctors need to follow and adhere to regarding clinical practice. My main responsibility in that is to copy edit the documents, making the information clear and legible, but an important part of that task is to highlight errors and things that just don’t make sense!

Sometimes I have to be the person who says, “No, we actually can’t do it like this anymore and we need to make a change.”

It��ѻ��ý not always an easy position to be in, because changes can be difficult to achieve in such a large organisation, but it��ѻ��ý a very valuable one. It��ѻ��ý a job that can actually have an effect on improving patient care, which is unusual in healthcare administration.

Q: Tell us a bit about your CUH journey – when did you join, what positions have you held here – why you like working at CUH?

My ��ѻ��ý career began over in CPFT where I worked in various child and adolescent mental health teams from 2013, but I made the move to CUH in March 2019, as the lead medical secretary for paediatrics.

That role is also tied to the paediatric oncology medical secretary role, so I got to know the paediatric haematology and oncology team and their work very well.

When Covid hit and many services stopped, ours was one of the few that stayed open. Children��ѻ��ý cancer is – thankfully – largely curable, with over 8 in 10 children surviving their cancer for five years or more, so it was vital for our service to keep going to make sure our patients were given the best possible chance of survival.

Q: How are you involved in our staff networks?

I’m a member of the LGBT+ Network, and I’ve been actively contributing to the network for the last few months or so. I’m bisexual, but in a very happy long-term (though sadly long-distance) relationship with a straight man, and I have struggled with having that “straight-passing” privilege for a long time. It��ѻ��ý not easy to know that an integral part of who you are isn’t immediately recognisable, that people make assumptions which just aren’t true.

Like many other people who identify as bi, I have sometimes felt that I’m “neither gay enough nor straight enough.” Being a member of the LGBT+ Network, signing up to the Rainbow Badge scheme, speaking up for LGBT+ colleagues, these are all ways I am trying to combat that little voice inside that says I’m not queer enough to be representing other bisexual people.

Q: How has CUH supported you to be your authentic self?

I actually feel it��ѻ��ý very difficult to show my authentic self in the workplace, but there are individuals with whom I have worked closely who I feel have seen me at my best and at my worst too.

Without colleagues and friends like that, it would be impossible to even begin trying to be my authentic self, so I am very grateful to them and CUH for putting us all serendipitously into the same melting pot.