Emergency Nurse

Shaunagh O’Connor

When she’s at work, Anne-Maree Pinder can never be sure what she might be doing in the next hour.

And she loves the unpredictable nature of her job.

The associate nurse unit manager at Box Hill Hospital specialises in the skills needed to keep the emergency department afloat.

“It’s always changing, no two days are the same,” says Pinder, 41.

“At one moment you could be dislodging a piece of Lego from a child’s nose and the next you could be resuscitating a patient.”

And emergency department nursing calls for team work as well the ability to support families “in the early stages of crisis”.

After years working as a personal care attendant and time in a family business Pinder, who had “always wanted to do nursing”, began studying in the field as a mature-age student in 2002.

“In my undergraduate year I did a rotation in the emergency department at Box Hill and loved it and thought, `that’s what I want to do’,” she says.

Pinder returned to Box Hill Hospital in her graduate year, working on a medical and surgical ward to cement her general nursing skills, before joining a six-month specialty-practice program in the emergency department, run by the hospital and aimed at attracting nurses into specialty areas.

“After that I really had the taste for learning, so I got a scholarship from the hospital and did the post-graduate diploma in emergency medicine at the University of Melbourne,” Pinder says.

Pinder worked for four days a week and studied for one to complete the year-long course.

“Box Hill has a very well-defined career pathway for nurses to use if they choose to,” she says.

Pinder began nursing at a time when her children, now 18 and 19, were in their early teens, so she came to value the new experience of shift work and night duty.

“I did have to adapt to that, but I found it useful in giving me time with the family,” she says.

“I could organise my shifts so I had a day off midweek to do tuck shop duty or go to a sports day.”

Job Lot:
Anne-Maree Pinder, assistant nurse unit manager at Box Hill Hospital, says nurses working in the department need a wide clinical knowledge and the ability to react instantly to a crisis.

“There are lots of parts to the emergency department,” she says.

“You can be doing plastering, looking after an injured ankle or lacerations, or you can work out in the cubicles where the patients are a bit more stable.

“You can work in the resuscitation area where the patients are quite unwell and then you can triage as well.

“I might be triaging and someone comes in with chest pains and I’ll get a description of the chest pain and it’s the nurse’s clinical knowledge and skills that tells them this person is potentially having a heart attack.”