I’m literally the only member of my immediate family who isn’t an HCP of some sort (doctors, nurses, midwives etc). Both parents, siblings, aunts, cousins are all involved in medicine, nursing or care work. My oldest DN left school recently and is working in a nursing home and planning to study for a related degree.
My parents met working in the same hospital. Siblings met their spouses that way and so on and so forth.
I’m the black sheep in that I teach at a university. Oddly my role at work does involve a fair bit of caring, psychology and biology as part of my day to day work.
I think the first thing I wanted to do as a child was to be a nurse. I had my little nurses uniform and a play doctors case etc and used to bandage up all my teddies and dolls and set up a “hospital bay” in the dining room. I also joined the St John’s Ambulance at 6, as soon as they’d have me. However, this was all because I was so used to visiting my parents and their friends at the Hospital Unit where they worked. My parents would swap me over at the ward as one started a shift and the other finished. Or we’d meet the on duty parent in the hospital canteen for dinner or breakfast. So all the adults I knew were HCPs.
As I got to know myself a bit better, I realised that I had abilities in other areas and also saw the downsides of working in healthcare. I didn’t want to do it.
I had a wobble before finally getting a post at a university and thought about retraining as a mature student. Too late to become a doctor (of medicine at least) at that age, so I was looking into becoming a highly specialised cardiac intensive care nurse. I told my mother and she nearly cried with joy. I told my friends and they all told me I was mad and betraying myself. In the end, it was my friends who were right. I’ll never forget though, how proud and emotional my mum was. It was obviously very important to her that I might follow her into the NHS. Maybe even more important than me going my own way and making the most of my natural abilities and the academic achievements I’d spent decades studying for by then.
Growing up, my father had said that he wanted me to go into Medicine, Law or Accounting and was extremely disappointed in me that I just didn’t want to. Of course, those were all careers he had pursued or had an interest in. I went to private school and one girl, a daughter of two Genito-Urinary Surgeons, was thrown out and cut off financially for giving up her place to study Medicine, to go to drama school (she was extremely talented). That was an extreme reaction but at my school the parents who were doctors, barristers, bankers etc often strongly encouraged, or even bullied, their children into the same path as them. I found it really sad.