We'd like to give a shout out to all our wonderful nursing colleagues, working across Derbyshire Community Health Services NHS Foundation Trust, for their dedicated service to the patients and families in our care.
In the week that marked International Nurses Day (12 May) we said goodbye to one of our longest serving nurses, Susan Warren, after an incredible 57 years. And we welcomed others just beginning their nursing careers, including Aileen Power.
Community nurse Susan Warren was given a fond farewell by colleagues in the Bolsover team who paid tribute to her passion for patient care and for sharing her vast knowledge and experience as a mentor to many nursing colleagues. Susan started her career as a cadet at the Nottingham Eye Hospital and qualified as an enrolled nurse in 1974. Four years later, in 1978, she joined the community team in Shirebrook and qualified as a registered nurse in 1981. After 40 years’ service she retired and returned part-time to support the Bolsover team in 2018 until just recently.
Newly qualified nurse Aileen Power has just secured her first post as a nurse on the ‘Newly Qualified Nurse Rotation Scheme’ with us and is very grateful to have her first rotation at the Florence Nightingale Community Hospital, Derby, on Ward 5. She said: “The journey to being a nurse has been a long time coming but it’s certainly been worth the wait!” You can read Aileen’s story here.
Nurses are the backbone of our care services with over 1,500 nurses and health visitors employed in our Trust and a further 1,300-plus healthcare assistants and other care support staff. These figures are based on whole-time equivalents, from March 2025, so the actual number of nurses and nursing support workers will be higher with part-time staff accounting for a proportion of our nursing teams.
We now have 102 Queen’s Nurses, (up from 68 in 2024 and 40 in 2023) who lead, develop and promote quality care for service users in community healthcare. Our internal Queen’s Nurses’ Forum meets four times a year to share good practice. We actively continue to support nurses from across all our community services to apply for the title of Queen’s Nurse, which is available to individual nurses who demonstrate a high level of commitment to community nursing. The Queens Nursing Institute believes that caring for people at home and in the community is fundamentally different from caring for patients in hospital. Community practice requires a different approach and different skills. The Queen’s Nurse title is not a qualification, it is a commitment to quality care, advocacy for patients and life-long learning.