TRAINEE nurse Julie Cooney is having an ‘eye-opening’ experience on placement at Wellington care home Camelot Lodge.

Mature student Julie, 46, is married with three children and is an undergraduate at Plymouth University’s School of Nursing and Midwifery.

She said: “Nursing has been my life-long ambition. Before I enrolled on my university course, I worked for two years at our local doctors’ surgery in the Teign Valley.

“I started off as a phlebotomist and then once I’d settled in and told them what I was hoping to do, they trained me to become a health care assistant. 

“My first week of placement at Camelot Lodge was quite an eye-opener. Working in a nursing home is very different from learning about nursing in the lecture theatre.

“But now I think it’s the biggest privilege to be entrusted with the well-being of so many vulnerable people and I’m getting fantastic support from my mentor at Camelot Lodge, Anil George.”

The specialist dementia-care home, along with the university’s health care practice placement development team, has organised a nine-week placement programme for first year nursing students.

Anil, who has worked at Camelot Lodge for three-and-a-half years, has taken Julie under his wing and Joanne Gold, practice placement development lead for Somerset, praised him for delivering a ‘very comprehensive and well planned’ teaching session.

Joanne said: “A placement like this gives our students a fantastic insight into multi-professional teamwork within healthcare, and demonstrates that nursing is not just about the ‘doing’, but also about the thinking, reflection and provision of evidence, teaching them to provide a safe and positive experience of caring.”

Camelot Care operations manager Clare Woodhead said: “Our homes provide very valuable learning opportunities in an innovative and dynamic environment, and we are delighted to be in the forefront among local dementia care providers in offering a student placement of this kind.”

The demand for specialist nurses is set to rise – the Alzheimer’s Society says 850,000 people in the UK suffer from dementia, with numbers likely to exceed one million by 2025.