Clinical nurse educator
A job as a clinical nurse educator is the result of a marriage between Mary Wyer’s careers in teaching and nursing. Wyer has been a clinical nurse educator at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst for the past year.
The nurse and former teacher says her background helped her secure the job.
“I really enjoy the educator role because I like working with the new nurses. I like to make their transition from university to practice easy because it is such a scary time for them,” Wyer says.
She works on the neuroscience and vascular ward, dealing with head injuries, traumas, strokes and vascular conditions.
Wyer says she was one of the last generation of nurses to be trained in hospitals in the mid-1980s. She completed her training with Royal North Shore Hospital but soon afterwards decided to go back to school to give teaching a go.
After 12 months as a primary school teacher, Wyer says she was drawn back to nursing and has been based as St Vincent’s on and off for the past 16 years.
Empathy and compassion are traits that Wyer says make a good nurse. Time management skills and the ability to think and act quickly are also crucial.
“You need to be able to think on your feet and you need to be able to assess situations quickly,” she says. “Because it is so busy and you have people’s lives in your hand you have got to be able to be thinking in a lot of directions at once. They say that it takes a special type of person to become a nurse but I don’t know if that’s true. I think that lots of different people become nurses for lots of different reasons.
“You find out pretty quickly if it is something you don’t want to do.”
Before taking up her position as a nurse educator, the 41-year-old says she spent a long time in relief roles which gave her invaluable experience in almost every department in the hospital.
From emergency to intensive care, to radio therapy and every ward in between, Wyer says she has covered every part of the hospital.
“I don’t think that there is any job like nursing. It’s different every day. It’s hard work but it’s always rewarding work,” she says.
How to be … a clinical nurse educator
To become a registered nurse you usually have to study nursing at university. You also need to have a minimum of three years’ ward experience. Call the Australian Nursing Federation on 02 6232 6533 or log on to visit http://www.anf.org.au/
