From aged-care floor to enrolled nurse in 18 months

Marisol had been on the floor for six years when a resident’s daughter asked her which nurse she was. “I said I wasn’t one. And then I drove home thinking about it for about four months.”

She enrolled the following February and kept her weekend shifts the entire way through. “I already knew the work. What I didn’t have was the theory underneath it, and the letters after my name.”

Six years of aged care turned out to be an unusual advantage. Marisol had seen the deteriorations the textbooks describe, and could put a face to most of them. What the diploma added was the reasoning — why the observations matter in that order, and what to escalate.

Marisol registered as an Enrolled Nurse eighteen months after her first class and works at the same facility, on the same floor, with a different badge. Two of her former colleagues have since enrolled.

“They ask me if it’s hard,” she says. “It’s hard. It’s also eighteen months. I’d already spent six years there.”