There is a shortlist of six for the Lucozade Nurse of the Year Awards, two of those nominated for honours are involved with training future nurses.
Ena Gurhy is the principal midwife teacher at the Regional Maternity Hospital in Limerick and in this role she
Is involved in helping a women to give birth to new life.
Ena is responsible for the care of patients before, during and after birth. She has always been interested in teaching students and studied in England for a year before working for eight or nine years at St James's Hospital in Dublin. For Ena the most important thing to remember is that all the women in care are individuals.
They all have different ideas, expectations of what their pregnancy is going to be like, what their labour is going to be like, what their baby is going to be like.
Should Ena win the £2,000 award towards further education, she would take a diploma course in midwifery.
After some 15 years in the nursing profession, Margaret McCarthy now tutors nursing in the Meath Hospital in Dublin. While no longer working on the wards herself, she takes great satisfaction in helping student nurses make decisions based on sound information. An advocate of higher education for nurses Margaret believes student nurses need time away from the clinical situation so they can consolidate information given to them on the wards.
Clinical experience on the wards can be combined with the knowledge we are giving them.
Margaret has no regrets about her chosen profession but adds,
You get out of a career what you are willing to put into it.
Margaret McCarthy went on to win the two top Lucozade Nurse of the Year Awards.
An ‘Evening Extra’ report broadcast on 17 February 1987. The reporter is Bibi Baskin.
