Laura Correia - Nursing Practice (Adult)

I moved to the UK (from Brazil) and worked as a healthcare assistant. After seven years, I thought it's time to step up my career and I wanted to continue to help people with more skills and more knowledge? So, I thought that adult nursing was the right opportunity for me.

With adult nursing, I think the possibilities are endless. Once you qualify, you can basically work in anything, community wards, acute wards, rehabilitation, research, neonatal. There's a lot of possibilities.

I had an amazing mixture of placements. I had acute placements, A&E, ICU, community, rehabilitation and a treatment centre. I had research, which was interesting. I loved it very much. It was a good mixture, and it was amazing to see different sides of the profession and how different people work?

As nurses, we need to provide holistic care to a patient. So before coming to nursing, I thought that's about giving medication and doing dressings, but it’s so much more than that.

We’re looking after the physical, the psychological and the social. But when I went to placements, I started to realise that the physical is very much there, but the spiritual sometimes was overlooked and that opened my eyes massively, to the needs the patients have and sometimes we don't think about.

Exclusively here, we have spiritual nursing care with Professor Wilfred McSherry and Doctor Adam Boughey. So, I developed my evidence base for practical assignments in spiritual nursing care and now this is becoming a research proposal. I'm really thrilled with that. To be able to work with spiritual nursing care in the future really excites me.

The staff are great. The people that work on the campus, they put you at ease all the time. If I struggled with anything, they were always there offering help.

The lecturers? I have no words. The support we have, they are just a call or email away,  anytime we need. If we are panicking before an assignment, they are there with the right words, helping us to feel calm before the submission and giving us the knowledge and information that we really need.

I got a job as a gastroenterology nurse with the NHS. I'm really happy with that because it's an acute place. Through my placement, I found out that I like the fast-paced environment, I like the escalation, so I’m definitely in the right place. I’m also preparing a PhD proposal in spiritual nursing care.

Being a nurse means a lot. It completes me as a person. It means to be caring, compassionate, helping others. But not on a superficial level of helping. It’s deep. You see people suffering, struggling from their illness, and you have the skills to be there and help them somehow and bring a little bit of hope. It's amazing. I couldn't think of doing anything else.