Celebrating International Nurses Day: Meet early years practitioner Stephanie Lynch
As part of our International Nurses Day celebrations, we spoke to Stephanie Lynch about what her role as an early years practioner and why she loves working within the community.
Introduce yourself and tell us about your role
My name is Stephanie Lynch and I’m an early year’s practitioner. I work with the 0-19 services in Enfield with the health visiting team.
The majority of my role is with children under 5 and so we carry out the developmental check that all children will have at 1 and 2 years old. We see where they are for their age and provide support should they need it.
There may also be things that parents contact us about and tell us that they need support with which can be anything from potty training to meal times to behaviour. We’ll also complete referrals so to a multitude of agencies including speech and language or the child development team.
How has the pandemic impacted your role?
As the EYP we do home visits to give them one-to-one support however with the pandemic, a lot of it at the moment is via video calls. We’re also not doing many groups or sessions so we can’t do things like weaning groups where we’d give parents advice, support and resources, or stay and play groups. I actually only started in October so I learned a new job and did training whilst working from home!
However the pandemic also allowed us to be more adaptable with technology and it was great how everything was able to move online quite quickly. It’s shown just how much we could change online whilst still being able to deliver the service.
You were previously working in a nursery, how does working in the community compare?
In a nursery whilst you’re looking after the children, there’s only so much contact and support you can offer. In the community we keep in contact with the families we’re working with doing regular follow ups every 4-6 weeks, so you can really see the progress the children are making and I really like that. Being community-based my days are always different which is great!
It’s also shown me now that working in the community is what I want to do - I feel like I can really support the families that really need it.
If you were stranded on a desert island what one item would you take with you?
My first thought was chocolate, but then would that help me survive? Depends how much you have I guess. Actually yes I would definitely say chocolate.
What do you like to do on a day off?
So I have two young children and if I’m on a day off when they’re at school, I’ll put my feet up with chocolate and binge-watch TV. I quite like going shopping or going to lunch with friends - I can’t wait until we can do that again!
Any final thoughts?
Working with the 0-19 service and the health visitors has shown me that they do a lot more than probably most people realise. As a parent I’ve had experiences with them and I didn’t realise how much support is given behind the scenes!