Tine Hansen is a liver transplant clinical nurse specialist and this year Tine is celebrating 20 years’ service with CUH! Tine shared their CUH story with us.
“I qualified as a nurse in Denmark in 1996. I originally worked in urology and orthopaedics before setting my heart on intensive care, where I worked within paediatric and adult settings for a couple of years before coming to the UK.
I started my CUH journey in the year 2000 working on the high dependency transplant unit when it was situated on level 9 (we are now on level 5). I worked as a staff nurse on the high dependency unit before applying for the transplant clinical nurse specialist post in 2005 and I’ve basically never looked back.
My day job is being part of a team who care for and assess patients for a potential liver transplant due to chronic or acute liver disease. We also provide support and expert knowledge for our liver transplant patient’s in life long clinics which are provided either at Addenbrooke’s or as part of our outreach programme across the UK. As a liver transplant clinical nurse specialist I do 24 hour on call, where my job is to receive donor offers for transplant and discuss these with the on call surgeon and medical consultant. If we accept an offer, I then arrange the recipient side of the transplant. The on call role covers liver, kidney, pancreas and small bowel transplant set ups and our retrieval team can travel nationally for this.
My day varies depending on whether I’m on call or if I have an outreach clinic to attend, which are often at Ipswich and Peterborough hospitals. I check phone/email messages throughout the day, attend ward rounds and provide post op education. I also attend assessment clinics and nurse led post-transplant clinics, maintain waiting list and provide NHS blood and transfusion with information, amongst other things.
I am very proud to be part of a great team of specialist nurses within the transplant team and I enjoy coming to work to a very supportive team of close colleagues.
The role of the transplant clinical nurse specialist provides patients with a contact point to the transplant services, we do a lot of triaging over the phone and via MyChart and we are often able to prevent visits to the emergency department or patients being admitted. We also travel to referring hospitals to see patients at their local centre to save them coming to Addenbrooke’s and relieving the pressure on our clinics.
We assess approximately 200 patients for liver transplants a year, carrying out roughly 120 transplants yearly and have well over a 2000 patients in lifelong follow up clinics. I am very proud of being a small part of the transplant speciality where there is constant development within transplantation and organ utilisation, resulting in better outcomes for our patients
It is a privilege to be able to follow the patients from point of referral, being listed and waiting for a transplant, calling them in for transplant and following up with them after.
We get to know our patients and their families very well, over a long period of time, and through a very complex and difficult time of their life. I also enjoy the mix of acute work that on call brings with the more predictive and routine work that my daily workload can bring.
I have enjoyed the challenges that come with moving to a new country, coping with a different language and working within a different health care system. I have always felt supported working within CUH both from a nurses’ perspective but also as a person coming from another country with the language, culture and educational differences this brings.