Nursing Education teaching team welcomes Catherine Jones as Senior Lecturer
- Monday, September 7, 2020
Catherine Jones has joined the Nursing Education team at the University of Roehampton, bringing with her almost 20 years of experience of working in Intensive Care Units, most recently providing critical care at St George’s hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Catherine’s start date at Roehampton was delayed to allow her to continue her work delivering essential care when COVID-19 led to St George’s having to triple their ICU capacity in a couple of weeks. Catherine said, “usually we have three adult ICUs… at the peak of the surge we had to set up four further ICU areas to provide critical care to people in our local population and beyond.” Catherine was also central in training and deploying nurses from theatres, endoscopy, paediatrics and adult wards and specialist nursing roles into COVID-ICU areas, called “Surge Nurses”. She added, “in a matter of days we set up a training programme called Introduction to Nursing in ICU for those with no ICU experience. This taught basic skills and knowledge to help transition Surge Nurses into our very specialist and by that time very busy ICUs.” Her work also included supporting all staff in learning new PPE protocols and how to use numerous new medical devices including new ventilators. With nursing rosters becoming increasingly stretched as the impact of the virus worsened, Catherine also worked in the ICU wards as Team Leader on General ICU, taking charge and delivering direct patient care.
As well as bringing the recent experience of delivering COVID-19 hospital care to our nursing students, Catherine has been an Intensive Care Nurse for 18 years. In 2014 she moved into Practice Education, training “New to ICU” nurses. She completed her Intensive Care Course in 2003, holds a PGCert in Education for Healthcare Professionals and has NMC Teacher and Fellowship (FHEA) status, demonstrating her commitment to learning and teaching in higher education. She has said seeing nurses she has taught delivering excellent, thoughtful, well informed care is one of the most rewarding parts of her work. Most recently during the COVID-19 surge, she saw her “New to ICU” nurses step up to do incredible things.
She is excited to join the Nursing Education at Roehampton because of the team’s reputation for professionalism and their commitment to students. For those considering a career in Nursing, Catherine has said “nursing is all about head, heart and hands. It is a demanding profession academically and emotionally, but it is a phenomenal feeling to be the person who made a difference some else.”
The University of Roehampton offers an MSci in Adult and Mental Health Nursing, a BSc (Hons) in Adult Nursing and a BSc (Hons) in Mental Health Nursing.