A nurse who has been working at festivals this summer told Nursing in Practice how the role has taught her how to get ‘on level’ with patients and has enhanced her appreciation for the work done in primary care.
Claire Cox, who has spent 25 years working in acute hospital care and currently works as patient safety lead at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, was the first nurse to be hired by Elite Medical – an organisation that supplies bank emergency service staff and training for events across southern England.
Ms Cox and the team regularly care for hundreds of patients over the course of each festival, recently seeing more than 600 patients over three days at a festival in Nottingham and dealing with a range of issues from minor injuries to drug overdose.
She explained how she has chosen festival nursing as a way to practise her clinical skills.
While leaning on skills refined over two decades, Ms Cox described the new challenges that festival nursing brings.
‘In hospital we don’t have hordes of people on recreational drugs coming through the door. And at these festivals, it is commonplace,’ she said, for example.
‘So, I’ve had to learn quickly about different types of recreational drugs, what the side effects are of having an overdose, how it interacts with other comorbidities, such as epilepsy, depression, anxiety and how that comes across.’
Working in a festival environment has made Ms Cox think more about the care that her patients are given before they arrive in hospital, she explained.
‘There’s so much care that you’re not aware about and the impact that care has had on the patient,’ she added.
‘It gives you a lot more empathy and compassion and understanding of different groups of people.’
When Ms Cox was hired earlier this summer she said the organisation at first ‘wasn’t sure what skills I’d be able to bring’.
Ms Cox believes nurses and paramedics ‘often don’t understand each other’s roles as well as we could’ but recently saw first-hand how they can work together effectively after collaborating with paramedics to care for a patient with a deep cut at a festival.
She recalled colleagues working as a ‘team’, with paramedics focusing on ‘logistical’ tasks like tending the wound while she oversaw safeguarding measures and provided emotional support to those involved in the incident.
‘When they’re working in a tent, they’re not used to looking after multiple patients at one period of time or prioritising who needs to be seen first,’ she said.
‘I’m good at doing that: organising the hospital and the flow of patients and what they need to have done.’
Since becoming a festival nurse, Ms Cox has been inspired to look for further training opportunities, focusing on radio communication and wound care training to improve the care she can give on festival sites.
‘I want to contribute more, so I’m going to seek out new courses that I can do. Nursing is just one of the best jobs, because you can go anywhere and do anything.
‘If you work within your scope of practice, know where your barriers are, and you know what your scope of practice is, you can have so much fun while doing something that you really love,’ she said.
