A few days back, I was thinking if I can ever find an occasion to open up my bottle of white wine- courtesy of the hospital during the xmas period. My lady boss caught me by surprise when she pulled me to her office the other day and guess what!


She handed me another bottle of white! This time it’s to celebrate my completion of the 1st year grad!!

Can’t believe I have worked here for a year already and has lived to survive the second floor madness! How quick has a year gone and next week we’re having new grads on our ward! I still can remember how naïve I was when I first applied for my job. Well, it was a last minute thingy as back then I dun really have a clue of what I want to do after my degree. So I thought it might be a good idea to just take the chance to work in a different country. Never did I expect that things would be so different from back home!! I still can remember how I got a shock when I first found out that Hypocount over here is called BSL (Blood Sugar Level). That’s the first time that I realised that OMG, I should have thought about all these differences when I applied for my job! How could I have not thought or suspected that things might be different back home from over here! Told you I was naïve!! But thankfully I managed to adapt to the work here quickly!

Guess it has been a great experience! Looking back, I haven’t got much experience in nursing at all after my dip in NYP. My so called nursing skills are all from the hospital practs and even though I was working in SNEC for a while before flying over to Perth, that wasn’t even counted as Florence nightingale’s sort of nursing, because it’s a totally different field of nursing! So it’s pretty amazing how I’ve managed to survived a year of surgical nursing because I totally have no hospital nursing experiences prior before!!

At this point of time, I’m pretty much in my comfort zone at my field of work. I have totally forgotten how it used to be like working in Singapore – more like I have only vividly images, memories of how Singapore’s hospitals are functioning like. Pardon me, but I seriously don’t recall how my RNs used to work in the wards in Singapore etc. IF ONE DAY I DO HAVE TO GO BACK TO WORK, I GUESS I WOULD BE A NOOB! As far as I know, I enjoy working over here despite many facts that I miss spore! But if you would to say to consider working here or back home, I would definitely say here would be a better place to work. I might be bias but that’s how I truly feel- FOR NOW.

Over here, RNs are all university gradates which means your patients seriously respect you big time for all knowledge. Whereas spore, sorry to say, but I guess it’s still the old fashion way of thinking that nurses are the doctors hand maiden and is not much respected. I guess salary wise and labour wise has proven my point here.

Well, I work in a lovely private hospital surgical ward (over here, it means that only if you have private insurance to cover your funds, you can seek treatment in a private hospital, if not you go to a government hospital) so I mainly take care of patients with elective surgeries instead of emergency surgeries, one good examples would be half a ward full of lap banding/ lap sleeve gastrectomy patients. But we do get our fair load of ICU transfer patients too. I guess that makes the nature of our ward a really high intensive paced and busy one which I totally loved it! Day goes by quicker when you are busy! As for now, I have not decided which field I really want to specialise in, therefore I’m happy to just stick to my surgical nursing. OH SHIT! That reminds me I have to meet lady boss and the area managers to discuss what I want to do for this year and talks about my plans and all this coming few weeks! SHRUGS! I hate caregiver developing plans!

Anyhow, back to my work. My ward is comprised of 30 single bedrooms. Shifts for us are 0700-1430, 1400-2130, 2100-0730. Usually we have 6-7 staffs on, which includes CNs, RNs and ENs. Within that 6-7 staffs, we work in teams of 2 taking care of 10 patients together. So I might be partner with either of which. Dunno about the ENs in spore, but over here, most of our ENs can give medication which includes IM injections too, just not DD drugs or IV that’s all! And they can basically do what we RNs can do, dressings, notes and all. So yea, there’s no such thing like only the RNs have to write notes or follow up with the Drs. And best of all, to protect Pt’s confidentiality we do tape recording for hand over, as much as I hate listening to myself accidentally on tape sometimes, I think it’s a good idea as it avoids bed side handing over, it also allows sufficient staffs to be on the ward answering calls bells etc during the handing over time. I guess maybe it’s because I’m working in a private we don’t have a drs that’s with us all the time in the ward or even on call drs. That’s why I guess it makes me grow in my nursing knowledge as I have to use critical thinking all the time. I can order blood test for patients, following up blood result or reports and informing the consultants most of the time etc. I really liked this independence which I guess spore could never offered me! But like I say, I might be bias in my words as I have not worked in any hospital in spore before. But if one day I go back and work, I am actually looking forward to making a different!


I guess I loved my work to bits to even have such a long naggy blog about it! Haha. How extreme! Oh well, to be honest, one part of me wanting to continue staying over here is my job satisfaction. At times like these, I guess we cant complain about our job can we? Thanks god I’m in nursing!

hehehe.