Paediatric qualified nurse with ten years of experience in both paediatrics and adult healthcare environments. Sophie has practiced in both acute care such as ICU and A&E units, and community-based such as district nursing and outreach services. She also has a successful background in account and project management in the health and hospitality commercial sectors. Most recently Sophie has been the team leader for a Covid department spanning Barts Health Trust.
BSC Paediatric Nursing – Swansea University
PICU Course Completion
Safeguarding Trained
BLS Trained
Sophie attended Swansea University in 2012 to study Paediatric Nursing. This choice was made due to her personal background exposure to complex care family members. For Sophie it was an opportunity to express her passion to care, understand, and meet the needs of a client holistically. During her Nursing training Sophie undertook three placements per year within different specialties, both within the hospital and community setting. The placements covered both Adult and Paediatric services. The diversity of placements enabled a broad spectrum of knowledge to be curated from these environments. This meant having to adapt to each audience and speciality adeptly, whilst developing a fundamental confidence and strong understanding and skillset of working within effective multi-disciplinary teams.
Following successful graduation and qualification of a 2.1 Sophie began immediate employment within Guy’s and St Thomas’ on the paediatric rotation programme. With experience gained in general medical, cardiology and PICU. Sophie continued in PICU for a further year. She confidently completed her intensive care, tracheostomy, and ventilation training and was signed off as able to practice independently on the unit. This environment meant exposure to many complex care patients sitting within neurology, orthopaedic, and cardiology.
Caring for complex patients and their families gave a deeper understanding of their needs and the services that could be implemented for those needs to be met. Sophie appreciates the importance of an accurate assessment underpins recommendations made. It also demonstrated the importance of advocacy and best practice.
Working with complex care patients meant working within a tight knit MDT, holding the responsibility of being the chief point of contact for that patient when working with occupational health, physiotherapy, pharmacy, community nurses, their assigned specialist consultants in charge of their care, the hospital school team and play specialists. This experience was key to honing my nursing skills, working in a fast paced and intense environment, and thriving on challenges. The ability to act quickly, work well under pressure and overcome new obstacles daily was necessary for the client to get the best healthcare experience.
Whilst Sophie was working in PICU she began mentoring and training newly qualified student nurses and orientating new starter nurses to the PICU environment. This included PICU specific training and becoming a sign off for competencies demonstrating safe staff practice in the unit.
Aside from the ten years of NHS expertise, Sophie has three years of experience in customer-facing commercial roles with a heavy focus on customer experience and HR management. Sophie enjoyed this as a way to diversify her professional capabilities and provide more scope to explore healthcare in a commercial and corporate setting.
Sophie began this commercial chapter at DCA, a virtual GP company which aimed to link primary and secondary care. Here she worked closely with the Product, Data, and Clinical teams in the build-up to the CQC audit of the company. Some of her main responsibilities included ensuring that all staff members and clinicians were trained adequately and were compliant with GDPR, Patient Safety, safeguarding fundamentals, and Clinical Governance whilst assisting in the creation of the company safety policies. During her time with DCA, she also contributed to product development by raising safeguarding issues missed in their downtime policies.
Having to liaise across various specialties within the company required Sophie to have a strong knowledge of all areas involved and being able to simplify technical and medical knowledge into understandable communications so that all teams had an appropriate degree of understanding. She was responsible for reporting to the senior leadership team with regular progress reporting and updating the company with the monthly newsletter. At DCA her contributions to the company were recognised with a certificate of excellence due to her assistance in getting the company CQC compliant.
After this Sophie went on to work in a client facing role within the services and hospitality industry, this meant exposure to finances, attention to detail and cost saving became a fundamental skill. Sophie account managed over 30 cocktail bars and restaurants independently. This role meant Sophie needed to have effective dispute resolution and problem-solving abilities. She refined her communication skills, ability to work well under pressure whilst managing multiple contracts simultaneously in this role.
She was also required to adeptly prioritise workloads to ensure smooth running of the service. She pro-actively anticipated client needs by building long term plans to manage expectations of the operational and service requirements of the companies. She effectively presented in senior leadership/board meetings, ensuring updates and changes were executed in a timely manner. She was responsible for the budget management, financial planning, quotation creation and operational management of services.
Sophie has then made a move back to the clinical setting by taking a role as a team leader in a covid department. Sophie was keen to return to a clinical role due to her deep knowledge of healthcare and goal setting perspectives as well as the creativity needed for this, but also what she was most passionate about. Sophie understands that in clinical setting you require the skill to think on your feet and have the courage in your convictions to make difficult decisions with and for a client to be their best advocate.
Sophie thrived in the leadership roles both in the relationship management but also in the Covid team, empowering her teams to improve and strive for excellence by refining their time management, attention to detail and overall confidence. She learnt key management techniques here such as how to keep a team motivated, how to deal with confrontation or problems that arose, and most importantly how to actively reflect to improve. Skills which underpin Sophie’s ability to manage a MDT and support worker packages.
Overall, Sophie has a diverse background which makes her very adaptable to new challenges and working environments, enabling her to be successful in the range of duties required of a case manager. Sophie remains passionate about helping people which is why she has undertaken the role of Clinical Case Manager. She has strong people, organisational and teamworking skills and always seeks to go the extra mile. She has a key attention to detail and is both trustworthy and personable making her easy to communicate with. Sophie’s professional and personal experience caring for a relative with a disability means she empathises and relate on a deeper level with her clients and motivates her to go the extra mile and to achieve the best outcomes for them, enabling her to care with a unique perspective.
