Nurse of the year award for east London A&E nurse who teaches teens to save stab victims

Ross Lydall @RossLydall9 October 2020

An A&E nurse who teaches young Londoners how to save the lives of stabbed friends has been crowned UK nurse of the year.

Ana Waddington, 31, who works at the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel, set up workshops in her spare time after becoming frustrated at the number of victims of serious youth violence arriving in the emergency department.

One teenager died on the operating table three years ago because his friends didn’t know how to stop him from bleeding to death.

Ms Waddington said: “It was a young person who had attended [the hospital] and sadly died, and had his friends known what to do, he possibly could have survived. It was a sense of frustration at the amount of young people who were coming in with all these huge injuries.

“I saw it as an opportunity to teach them a really fundamental skill but also hopefully to inspire young people to be proactive in their communities and promote the next generation of healthcare professionals from a non-traditional background.”

Ms Waddington was last night named the Royal College of Nursing nurse of the year. She worked extra shifts and used her own savings to establish the YourStance project, which has reached 480 at-risk youngsters in prisons, pupil referral units and in east London communities in the last two years.

It began with Ms Waddington and two volunteers taking a mannequin to Feltham young offender institution, but has now grown to include 150 volunteers, including nurses, doctors and paramedics, whom she co-ordinates in her spare time.

She said: “We focus on the most at-risk young people and in the most at-risk environments. We have heard that one of the young people we taught has used one of the mechanisms that we had taught him to keep himself alive while he was waiting for an ambulance.

“If a young person is able to guide someone in helping them if they’re in an emergency, or to help someone in an emergency, then our job is done.”

RCN deputy president Yvonne Coghill, who chaired the judges, said: “I was totally blown away by Ana. She is so professional and innovative.”

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