NHS 75: Essex Nurse's 42-year career
Tracy Reed has worked for several hospitals across the county
Essex Nurse Tracy Reed is celebrating the NHS turning 75 years old, whilst having spent over half of those years being part of it.
Now working as Clinical Lead for End of Life Care at Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT), she began her career at the age of 17, a an administrative assistant at Warley Hospital.
Tracy's worked in many hospitals across the county over the years, serving at St Margaret’s Hospital in Epping, the Herts and Essex Hospital, Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Stansted Clinic and Loughton Clinic.
Changing roles
In 1985, Tracy began training, which enabled her to have a varied career in nursing, before going on to do a Masters degree and further her knowledge.
Tracy had never considered being a nurse or working for the NHS, despite the face her mum and sister were both nurses, until she had to help a patient who had a cardiac arrest.
"I was the first aider and I resuscitated him. He was alive when the ambulance came, but then he had a massive heart attack and died.
“I wanted to understand why I had brought him to life but then he had died.”
After completing her training, Tracy worked in general medicine, and decided she liked working with people and having the opportunity to get to know them.
"I always had a passion for end of life. I really felt rewarded when we got it right and when people had good end of life care, I worked in coronary care."
Once Tracy's family came along, she moved into elderly care nearer to home, to enable her to look after her family until her youngest started school, where she continued to be a carer in her community.
"I started in the community then and I've been in the community ever since and absolutely love it. I did my district nurse training and became a district nurse. I've worked across all the localities in in Essex and have developed in my role.
"I went off to do my degree in district nursing and Community specialist practise and then for a short time I was seconded to manage a cancer information and support service where I became a Macmillan professional.
"Again the end of life was just the bit that I really, really enjoyed. Supporting people and ensuring we got it right and from there I was then seconded into an end of life care."
For Tracy, getting to watch both the NHS, and her teams grow and develop is something she doesn't take for granted.
"It's been really exciting to watch staff grow and develop confidence and and deliver good care.
"So for me I sort of think I've grown along with them and the NHS, continuing to do lifelong learning."
In 2012, Tracy became a Queens Nurse, a title given to nurses who demonstrate a high level of commitment to patient care and nursing practice.
A career to be proud of
Tracy told Greatest Hits Radio that after 42 years in the NHS, she has no intentions of leaving anytime soon.
"Nothing makes me prouder than saying that I work in the NHS.
"It's a proud badge to wear and it is a national institution at the end of the day, it's about supporting people from the cradle to the grave and is about when people lose their health.
"They haven't always got control over that, and it's how we support that and how we ensure the services are there to meet their needs and to meet the needs of their loved ones as well. Because especially in end of life care, we're not just nursing that person and, you know, we're all individuals, we all come to the table with something different.
"I think being a nurse allows me to do that to to see people as individuals. But wearing the NHS logo, it's recognisable across the world to everybody and actually not all the countries have got that.
"I think if you have an emergency, if you need care, the NHS is the best place to be and I'm really, really proud of that."
Supporting those across the world
Tracy wanted to use her experience from healthcare in the UK to help others less fortunate, and has seen people walk 15 miles to see a doctor, when volunteering with other Queen's Nurses in Nepal. Tracy went out to the country, which has no free healthcare, to help support people after the devastating earthquake in 2015.
"I have to say, when I went to Nepal it was life changing. I think to go to a developing country and I realised how naïve I was around the fact that we all take our services for granted. We just assume that if we need the doctor we just make an appointment and we go to the doctor.
"For Nepal, they pay for their healthcare, many of them are poor. I went after the earthquake, so many of them were living with total life, changing experiences. I met people who would have been on base camp when the earthquake hit and lost many of their friends. There's no mental health services in Nepal, so again, people had post traumatic stress, but there were no facility to support that.
"The local hospitals are often miles from where they actually live, and sometimes they walk 15 miles to see a doctor from high up in the Himalayan mountains. witnessed people being carried 15 miles from that by their family, from some of those remote villages"
Tracy was part of a team that set up many different support services in Nepal during her time there, including providing toothbrushes to children who were only given Coca-Cola to drink, as it was cleaner than trying to sort out fresh water.
She went back two years later to see how the progress had helped locals.
"The nurseries and the schools, every child that's started got a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste and was shown how to clean their teeth. You know, they were lots of things that.
"There were health centres that were doing health checks free of charge because, we did a lot of work with the same society, which is a society that supports people."
No stepping down in sight
Tracy told Greatest Hits Radio that even after 42 years in the NHS, she has no intentions of leaving the service any time soon.
"I can't imagine I will ever do anything else cause it totally is in my blood. I know the NHS is where fundamentally I've grown up and I feel like I've not just developed as I've got older as a person, but the NHS is almost been that other element of family to me, I've worked with some absolutely amazing people and my career is allowed me so much and that I'm really grateful to them and really grateful for any NHS that I've actually had to have in terms of services for myself or my family.
"So I can't imagine not wanting to give anything back and that cradle to the grave that they say is very much an important element for me. And I only work part time now cause I did actually take my NHS pension and because of the amount of years I've done but I couldn't give up!
"I don't imagine I'll give up, my family tell me that I'll still be here when I can't really stand up anymore, but I'm not sure about that! There's many people been who've been students in my care, or I've worked alongside, they've also gone on to do amazing things and I think that is one of the main things that the NHS provides people. If you commit to the NHS then the NHS will commit to you as a professional and allow you to develop and grow in your role and grow as a person and and and have a voice to support things that need to happen for the future.
"Because the world is ever changing."