|
The Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, 1962…
They sang it first.
Big Girls don’t Cry… that’ yer ear worm for the weekend!
Neither do big boys… at least we’re not supposed to.
I have news. This one did.
I read an article and I could feel the stinging. The tears welling in my eyes. I blinked and a big fat tear ran down my cheeks and splashed onto the page.
Big boys and old geezers do cry. I was reading about nurse Susie Lagrata.
I read her life story. The courageous decisions she made. How she came to be here today.
Tears of admiration. Tears of regret. Tears of shame. Tears of joy and love.
She left her baby daughter with her husband, in the Philippines and came here to start a career as a nurse.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? After all, a record number of 25,000 international nurses joined the register last year.
It is not.
In 1996 she’d finished her degree in adult nursing and worked as a mandatory volunteer and then a critical care nurse for two years.
Just months after getting married she gave birth. At the time she was earning £50 a month for six days a week.
Even as a qualified nurse, she was living in poverty. Faced with the opportunity to be interviewed for the possibility to come and join the NHS, she had to buy only half a tin of baby milk to afford the bus ticket to attend an interview.
Aged 23yrs she said good by to her family her husband and her daughter and came to the UK to join the UCL.
She said;
‘… I find it hard to talk about as it was the most painful experience of my life…’
Enough to make a strong man weep.
Her recruitment had involved six months of exams, interviews and a medical. Her leaving had none of the soft landing we might expect today. No WhatsApp, no FaceTime, no email.
She could only phone home when she could afford a telephone card.
Eventually, she was joined by her husband and child but it took four years for them to afford the rent on a flat.
New culture, a cold climate, canteen food and the mystery of custard. All of this is published in this month’s £walled ‘Nursing Standard’…
... unless you can get hold of a hard copy, know a nurse or can kick over a pay-wall, you won’t be able to read it.
Tears of frustration that this true-life story could stay between the pages of a magazine and not in the hearts of the 1.4m people working with Suzie. Know her story and all the other Suzie’s.
My message today, to the management of the magazine, let this article about Susie escape under the wire. We all should know what it’s like to travel half way around the world and arrive here, to work in the NHS.
It’s a lesson for every employer inviting overseas staff to come here. The things we must do better.
How Suzie managed derogatory comments about how she spoke and obvious racism, to become an advanced nurse practitioner, winning and RCN award in 2022 for her trailblazing work in headache treatment. Opening the first nurse led clinic offering multiple cranial nerve blocks.
She travels the world, spreading her expertise.
Her daughter is now in her early twenties and is a nurse at UCLH.
Tears of joy.
Suzie came to work here out of poverty, necessity. Now she hopes Philippine nurses will come here out of choice.
This is a moving story that touched a nerve. Got my lacrimal system working overtime. That made we think when we so glibly talk of recruiting overseas. There is so much more to it.
My tears were from a realisation of how callous we can be but at the end they were tears of joy for a story well told and a happy ending.
Get hold of a copy of this month’s Nursing Standard. Steal it, bribe someone, pay double. Cosy up to an RCN member and read their copy when there’re not looking.
Do what ever it takes. Read it.
Note to the bosses of the Nursing Standard, please, make an old man happy,
put a link to Suzie on SoMe… thank you.
Have the best weekend you can.
| 
