Spalding nursing student has won a national award.
Tonicha Patterson (28), who studies at Anglia Ruskin University in Peterborough, received the Student Nurse of the Year: Children award at the Student Nursing Times Awards.
She picked up her accolade during a glittering ceremony at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House Hotel in London.
The third-year BSc (Hons) Nursing (Child) student said: “It was a bit of a shock to win the award and very overwhelming. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into the course, regardless of where you are at this point, with assignments and placements. It feels as though that hard work has paid off.”
Tonicha was praised by judges for her passion for children’s nursing and family-centred care.
The judges also referenced an incident during her first year when Tonicha witnessed nursing colleagues on placement providing resuscitation to a very young child who had suffered a respiratory cardiac arrest.
While feeling overwhelmed observing the situation at the time, Tonicha used the experience to learn everything she could, and ended up in a similar situation in her third year.
On this occasion, the learning and development she had undergone during the nursing course meant she could assist, with supervision and support from colleagues, with the resuscitation of an adult patient in A&E who ended up recovering.
Tonicha said: “I was completely overwhelmed by how much the nurses were involved in the resuscitation of the child, I had thought it would be led by clinicians.
“At the time, I didn’t feel it was something I would be able to do, so every day I tried to learn more about it.
“It was about developing my confidence so that I was able to be involved in that second situation two years later.”
