Episode 5 - Alicia Perkins on the realities of nursing and the things you can't "unsee".

Beneath the Armour

Summary

This week I’m excited to bring you the first of my conversations with a nurse!
Alicia Perkins is a lecturer in nursing at Federation University in Australia. She has worked clinically in a variety of areas across her career, including cardiology and critical care.

Notably, her leadership roles have involved managing a variety of cardiac catheter laboratories in both Cyprus and Australia (this is a hospital room where doctors perform minimally invasive tests and procedures to diagnose and treat cardiovascular disease.)

Alicia provides a really great overview of her own experience of nursing but also the profession in general.

She tells us how “the reality of nursing is not Gray’s Anatomy.” One of my favourite quotes from this conversation was: “You can’t unsee things, you can’t unhear things, you can’t unsmell things.”

She gives us a raw account of what nursing involves and also why it is so satisfying. We talk about the impact this work has on nurses and other healthcare workers; namely, through trauma.

Alicia candidly talks about some of her own traumatic experiences that she explains left a lifelong mark on her.

We also talk about the gender disparity in nursing and Alicia shares some reflections on how this impacts the distribution of men and women into leadership roles, and how this did (or did not!) affect her career.

This conversation inspired me even more with the work I do in supporting healthcare professionals take care of themselves. I hope it inspires other people and helps laypeople appreciate the role of the nurse even more.

Resources

Check out this latest article published by Alicia that examines the psychological constructs that influence male perceptions of nursing as they seek to navigate the profession, and what aspects influence men to consider nursing as a career: https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe10030051