Professor Martin Steggall

“When I was 16, I started working in a bank and I absolutely hated it. I had a chat, serendipitously, with my GP. Because I have a lifelong disability, I interfaced with healthcare professionals on a fairly regular basis. I was chatting with my GP about careers, and he said to me, go and do something that you know about. So, I rather flippantly said, well, I know what it's like to be in hospital because I have consumed an awful lot of NHS resources and spent a lot of time in hospital during my childhood, and my brother at the time was also very unwell and I used to get involved with doing some of his clinical care. He said to me, why don't you think about that as a career? 

“I became a nursing auxiliary in an elderly mentally ill unit as they were called in those days. I loved it. My very first staff nurse job was at St Thomas's in London, on a general medical ward. I then moved into urology, and I quickly realised that what I love is surgical nursing. I'm a surgical nurse through and through, and I absolutely adored my time on the urology ward. It was brilliant, an absolutely fantastic time - a mixture of serious heavy surgery coupled with, long term urological problems needing a surgical intervention, with medical urology, etc. 

“I was working with a consultant urologist Chris Fowler on a large, multi-centre research project comparing two different surgical treatments. I was then asked to work in outpatients, to see all patients and essentially assess them and then present my assessments to the consultant, and that was really interesting and relatively unusual at the time. Whilst I was doing that, from 1998 to 2001, I also did my master's degree in physiology. 

“Whilst working with Chris, he became the lead in the Medical School for Medical Education, and he asked me to lead some problem-based learning groups. I started to do that alongside my clinical work. I did some teaching for City University, London and in 2002 I became a lecturer in Applied Biological Sciences, being appointed as the Head of Department a few years later. Alongside this I continued to work in the clinic, and I started my PhD. I later became the Associate Dean, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the School of Health, where I worked until December 2014, working with the leads for nursing, midwifery, radiography, optometry and speech and language therapy.

“I secured an honorary contract with Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board in the Department of Urology in 2015. I do a clinic a week, or a couple of clinics a month, in urology, specifically erectile dysfunction, although occasionally patients escape the triaging process, and I end up dredging my memory for prostate disease etc. It has enabled me to continue doing research into various things that happen in urology. I was REF returned in 2014 and 2021, just a couple of papers in each, and I still try and weave it into my day job.

“The thing I love most about nursing is that you can kind of make micro differences without being in the spotlight. You try and make a difference to every patient, but you’re anonymous, so you don't have to be in the spotlight. Clearly, the patient knows they're being nursed, but they don't really know who I am. I'm just another nurse.

“I think the thing that holds it together for me, and the reason why I keep going back, is that it's still trying to make a difference to the person in front of you, still trying to be compassionate, empathetic, and hopefully making a positive difference in the most dignified way possible. I like working around in the background, like trying to encourage success in others, and in nursing, it allows me to quietly try and make a difference. 

“I never thought I would end up as a Pro Vice-Chancellor. Never. I had an open mind when I went into nursing, recognising that it didn't necessarily lead to a particular destination.

“I remember someone saying that you don't find a career in nursing, the career finds you. And I think nursing is amazing for the incredible breadth of opportunity, the only limits really are your own imagination in some respects. But I also recognise that that is facilitated by other people as well - all our other colleagues in the NHS and other care sectors have enabled that to happen, too.

“Nurses are seen as a bit of a homogenous group, and when we talk about nursing people tend to think about ward nursing and it's obviously so much more than that. Obviously, we've got our community colleagues, mental health, learning disability, we've got outreach teams, all sorts of breadth, but it tends to be distilled into what goes on in hospital or on the wards. Sometimes the talents and the skills of my nursing colleagues are not necessarily understood clearly by the public.

“I think that caring is such a poorly understood term, and yet if you are on the receiving end of it, you know when you've had good care.”