Top 100 nurse at our Trust wants to put nursing on the map

If you ask Emma Blakey about being named as one of the top 100 nurses in the country, she simply smiles and plays it down.

"I didn’t even know I was listed until people started tweeting about it!"

Emma was named as one of WeNurses' '100 outstanding nurses' at the end of last year. WeNurses' Twitter account has over 80,000 followers, and they asked people to talk about nurses who made a difference to patient care, the understanding of best nursing practice, the public understanding of nursing, and had positively promoted nursing.

"I've been using WeNurses for a while because it's a great way of keeping in contact with nurses across the globe. I've learned a lot - they host online nurse chats and share knowledge and learning with all of us."

Emma, who works in the Endoscopy department of the John Radcliffe Hospital, said that being recognised by her peers was a particularly special feeling.

Professor June Girvin, Professor Emeritus of Nursing in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at Oxford Brookes University, was the first person to nominate Emma.

She said: "I first encountered Emma when she was a student nurse - she was curious about everything and was full of questions. She has really embraced the importance of pursuing higher education in order to improve her practice and, partly as a result of that, is engaging with research and pursuing PhD studies whilst still an early career nurse.

"For me, she is the epitome of a twenty first century nurse - clever, curious and committed. I'm proud to have played a very small part in her continuing development. She's an excellent role model."

Born in the John Radcliffe, Emma has come full circle. In the meantime, she's lived in London, York, Madrid and Valencia. Her previous jobs have included teaching English and helping run a youth club in Madrid. She worked with young children who often had difficult home lives and weren't attending school regularly, and she helped set up regular sessions to help them with homework, education and building their confidence.

"That was always really rewarding," she says, "and it often turned out that the children thrived in these sessions. They felt like school wasn't for them, but the structure and involvement at the club really helped them."

Emma has been back in Oxford for the past six years, with three years dedicated to her nursing degree in Oxford Brookes and three years working as a qualified nurse.

"Endoscopy is an interesting field," she says, "and it's often the starting point of someone's journey and treatment. Endoscopy is a way of looking at people's insides - looking for a bleed, cancer symptoms, or anything that might mean someone isn't digesting their food properly. People often come to us and are very worried about what we might find, or about some of the procedures, and I see it as a big part of my job to treat them with care and compassion and put their minds at rest and understand why they feel the way they do."

"Nursing is all about the human connection," says Emma, "it's our job to make someone feel safe, get them through what can often be the toughest times of their life, and treat them with dignity and thoughtfulness and all the while keeping our clinical judgement at the front of our minds."

Emma is also working on her PhD exploring a patient experience topic, and helps manage social media accounts for a nursing journal.

Amongst all of this, Emma has been thinking about the future.

"Finishing my PhD is the main one! I have a year left - it's around patient experience and repeat visits to hospital. I'm really interested in what we can do as nurses to support people."

Back to the present, and it's a normal working day for Emma.

"Part of nursing is wanting to make a difference. It's incredibly humbling to be recognised by my peers - but a bit of a strange feeling because I'm not really one for having my name out there! I'm very lucky to have such supportive colleagues, they're always encouraging me. They're genuinely happy for me, and that makes the hard work worth it."