Advice for new health & social care graduates

I've been privileged to be invited as the guest of honour and to give a short speech at two academic award ceremonies at a local University.  Those graduating will include midwives and nurses from child, adult, learning disability and mental  health fields. There will also be post-graduate awards including health visiting, school nursing, medical and dental education, operating department practitioners and assistant healthcare practitioners amongst many others.

I want to give a speech that is relevant to today's practitioners, so I turned to Twitter to seek the best advice that current nurses and students have either received or would like to hear. On a Saturday afternoon, the following two simple tweets started a conversation:

"What's the single most helpful/inspirational piece of advice you've ever had in your nurse training/career?"

and

"Student/newly qualified nurses/midwives; if you qualified tomorrow, what's the one piece of advice you'd want to hear?"


The conversation that ensued went on for two days and continues as I write this blog.  This Storify documents a selection of some of the best advice from wonderful people who took time to join the conversation, which included over 25 unique pieces of advice and many common themes:

My task now is to find a way of turning this into a meaningful speech, which I will share in a future blog.