The Exchange

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The Exchange: Nurses

Nurses

BBC Radio 4 - The Exchange, Nurses

Two strangers meet to share a common experience, and their differences. They bring a gift.

Two nurses - Craig Davidson and Lisa Sheehy - share their stories, their decisions about whether to stay or leave the profession and exchange a gift.

Two people who share a common experience, meet for the first time. Each has a gift for the other - an object that unlocks their story. With the help of presenter Catherine Carr, they exchange personal experiences, thoughts and beliefs, as well as uncovering the differences between them.

Craig Davidson and Lisa Sheehy both chose a career in nursing. They share their stories, their decisions about staying and leaving the profession, and exchange their gifts.

At the heart of their exchange is the question of what motivated them to become nurses and why one of them decided to leave. As well as their personal accounts, Lisa and Craig explore the contradictions in nursing and whether the heroic rhetoric around the profession is toxic.

Lisa was a self-confessed eleven year old “geek” when she decided to become a nurse. Breaking her foot doing a cartwheel introduced her to the world of hospitals.  She says “there was something about these women helping me. It was an epiphany. I found my vocation.” But between the dream and the reality fell a gruelling and, eventually unsustainable, life. 

Ambitious and academic, Lisa specialised in palliative care and rose to a senior job. She describes the gradual “grinding down” as colleagues left and their roles were not filled. The breaking point came when a colleague died suddenly. She’d told her team, “this job is killing me.” It wasn't the job that lead to her death, but it felt like a warning to Lisa. 

She handed in her notice the next day and left nursing in 2017. She felt guilty, and still does. What do you do when you leave the vocation you chose at as a child?  Lisa joined her actor husband on tour and took an acting role, later trained as a naturopath and now works for a touring opera company. Nursing proved to be a useful place to learn some basic acting skills - “nursing involves a lot of acting. You have to be nice all the time!”

Lisa and Craig share a few uncanny parallels in their lives - they studied nursing at the same Scottish university, and acting is a common thread.

Craig was a 30 year old actor when he decided to give up the stage and become a nurse. He had been offered a place to read medicine at 18 but decided to “run away to London”, come out as gay and pursue a career in drama. He made it onto the West End stage but left when he realised he was not going to make it as a lead player. As he says, “I like being the best!”

Craig quit the stage, had a period of mental illness and returned home to Glasgow where he trained as a nurse. He was following in his mum’s footsteps. An award winning student nurse, he qualified as the Covid pandemic struck and his first job was in a Covid hub. 

Although he knew what a nursing career involved from his mother, nothing could prepare him.

One night, four of his nine Covid patients died. He describes an environment where guidance changed hour by hour, where he felt unprepared for the enormity of the task and ended up going home to “cry, and cry and cry”. There were times he thought of quitting but says “if you cut me, you will find rings running through me with the word 'nurse'.” 

Craig felt a hypocrite. At work he was struggling to cope and becoming “hardened” by his job. In his spare time he was co-hosting his podcast on nursing ‘Retaining the Passion’ which focuses on how to keep nurses motivated. He explains how he adapted and re-discovered his love of nursing.

Both take issue with the public and political image of nurses as “angels”. They discuss whether that label is a mechanism for shutting down debate on pay and conditions and ask why nurses who challenge the system are seen as “difficult”. Lisa has finished that fight, and Craig accepts it’s now his battle.

At the heart of their exchange is the question of why nurses like Lisa leave, and how that can be reversed. Lisa and Craig wrestle with the contradiction of a profession that demands endless empathy and kindness, but also academic rigour and evidence based judgment. How can you reconcile the duality of a job that seems to require you to be both superhuman and human? They question a professionalism that  expects them to tolerate things other professionals would never accept. These are the questions they tackle with honesty and humour.

Lisa walked away from a career she once loved, Craig is detemined to make sure others don’t. The gifts they choose for each other reflect the practical and personal demands of nursing, but also the truth that sometimes you have to leave something you once loved to thrive.

Presenter: Catherine Carr

Producer: Louise Cotton

Executive Producer: Jo Rowntree

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4

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