Hospital celebrates nurses’ ‘excellence, dedication and compassionate’ care

“Excellence, dedication and compassionate” care was celebrated on Friday at Lynn’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) as International Nurses Day was marked across the globe.

The hospital has 1,084 skilled nurses caring for patients on wards, emergency departments and in a variety outpatient settings.

In 2022/23 more than 76,000 new patients attended the QEH in need of care. The majority of these would have been cared for by a QEH nurse.

Helen Blanchard, Interim Chief Nurse at the QEH, said: “I’d like to say a very big thank you to each and every one of our nurses here at Team QEH.

“International Nurses Day is an opportunity for us to recognise the vital contribution that our nursing workforce makes across the NHS. We simply would not be able to provide the care we do without our team of dedicated nurses – they are the lifeline of our hospital.

“I am a proud nurse myself so celebrating my nursing colleagues is something I am very passionate about. Thank you, to our nurses for all you do and all you will continue to do, thank you for your dedication to our patients and to the profession – you mean so much.”

To celebrate the day, nurses at The QEH were treated to cake deliveries throughout the weekend as a small way of thanking them for their hard work.

Tom Edwards, Nursing Degree Apprentice on West Newton Ward joined the QEH as a healthcare assistant and wants to become a nurse.

He said: “I love the idea of being able to help people and when I heard about the ‘home-grown’ scheme of training to be a nurse I knew this was the role for me.

“This enabled me to train in a ward-based setting gaining invaluable experience. The feeling of getting home from work and knowing you’ve made such a positive impact on the lives of your patients and their loved ones really is what makes my job so worthwhile.

“I love to go the extra step to make my patients and families feel reassured and well cared for during their stay.

“Even during the busiest of shifts, I feel supported within my team of colleagues and a mix of these two things are the reason I love my job as a nursing degree apprentice.”

In February, the Trust welcomed it’s 50th cohort of international nurses.

Since then, Team QEH has welcomed more than 400 international nurses who have brought a wealth of experience and expertise with them.

If you’d like to find out more about a career in nursing please visit: University of East Anglia or Anglia Ruskin University.

If you are a registered nurse and interested in joining Team QEH, please contact Jade Dennis, recruitment and retention coordinator via email at jade.dennis@qehkl.nhs.uk.