Introducing Chene Fenske, our amazing Registered Nurse and Nurse Educator here at Ormiston Hospital. Chene’s current position with us requires her to oversee all of our clinical team’s education. This is a big job, and requires her to be across a lot of projects, read more about Chene’s insight into what it’s like to be a nurse and her career so far. 

What I love most about nursing is that every day brings new opportunities to learn. I don’t know if you know this about nursing, but we have great work stories because we meet really great patients.
Sometimes those patients learn from us, but more often we learn from them. We frequently learn from them in a clinical capacity in the sense that we broaden our clinical knowledge and clinical skill sets. In turn patients learn from us when we nurse them and provide them with discharge education or information about their medications. However, it is the non-clinical lessons in nursing that I love the most.

When I think about the highlights of my career they are always the stories patients shared with me. These are the times I sat at a patient’s bedside and listened to stories about their families and their life experiences. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was learning valuable lessons too. I can think of numerous times where a patient has lifted my spirits and cared for me by making me laugh or sharing a story with me. So what I love most about nursing is that every day we learn something new about ourselves and our patients.