We’d like to introduce you to Karen Norris, who recently joined the Maples management team as clinical manager.
Karen has had an interesting and varied career so far. After working for the Metropolitan Police as an administrator and then ten years as a mortgage advisor, she decided to follow her heart and realise her childhood dream of a career in healthcare – and has never looked back!
Karen started her new career as a care assistant in a Bupa home, working a mix of days and nights to accommodate the needs of her young family. After eleven years at the home, Karen decided to train as a nurse via the Access to Nursing scheme. This meant 18 months of theory at college to get the qualifications needed to study nursing at the University of Greenwich. Balancing her family commitments with her studies, and also working nights at the Bupa home was extremely tough, but Karen sailed through. She qualified in 2006 and joined NHS Oxleas as an emergency response nurse within a prison.
“It was real challenge to be a newly qualified nurse in a secure unit of a male prison”, she says. “It was an incredibly busy role too – with just myself and one GP to cover 1300 inmates! I was also often called upon to be a witness at court or inquests, and deal with frequent instances of self-harm and increasing mental health problems, all of which skyrocketed during the pandemic.”
Despite the high-pressure nature of the work, Karen stayed for seven years and freely acknowledges how useful and relevant the whole experience was. “I learned how to stand my ground in difficult situations, to be autonomous – with no-one else to ask for help – and confident in making my own decisions,” she reflects.
Facing burnout after the pandemic, Karen moved back into residential care, performing a couple of senior roles before receiving a warm welcome here at Maples!
It’s a busy role and she works closely with home manager Nicola Bundock. A typical day involves an early morning tour of the home to check on residents’ health, doing an audit of equipment that needs repairing and managing the dashboards for MCM and Atlas, our digital care and medication systems. Her main priorities are helping to write care plans that are more person centred, working with staff to improve their documentation and educating the nurses to manage the MCM dashboard themselves. She’s struck by how close the home team is at Maples.
“The whole team is incredibly supportive – everyone pulls together and works so well as a team,” she says.
She is also very focused on the residents’ dining experience, ensuring that our residents look forward to their meals and that residents with dementia are also offered plenty of food choices.
Away from work Karen lives with her two sons – Jack, 21, and nineteen-year-old Harrison – plus Blue, their affectionate and lively Staffordshire bull terrier, and she also enjoys spending quality time with her parents.
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