It has been quite a while since I last wrote, and while I would like to say that the reason behind this is because I have been busy, that would be a lie. Unless you count playing ‘Rift’ and lounging around on the sofa watching TV while eating chocolate ‘busy’.

As Sirens is due to air from next week (Sirens being the new name for ‘Naked Apes’, a name change that I believe came from Channel 4) I’ve been doing a fair bit of publicity for it, mostly in print, and one of the questions that I am normally asked is ‘Why did you start a blog?’

The answer is largely in two parts – the first and most superficial part is that I was reading blogs and thought that people were having a whale of a time as a result of them being bloggers and that I wanted to have that sort of lifestyle. The second reason was due to passion.

When I was working on the ambulance service I was passionate about a lot of things. About the way the service was being run, about the patients who would use and misuse the service and about the supporting services and the rest of the NHS. I would be angry about the care that the elderly were getting in nursing homes. I would be frustrated at the lack of working kit on the ambulance. I would struggle to understand how someone with a verruca could consider that an ambulance was an appropriate response. I was joyful about the fun jobs that I would go to.

While a lot of that passion was negative (especially towards the end of my time in the ambulance service), it still provided me with the energy to come home after a twelve hour shift and write about something.

Since changing my job I am a lot more content in life. I don’t have to fret about shift work, I have less pressures from above to do the impossible, I get regular hot meals.  Most importantly I am treated as an adult who doesn’t have to ask for permission to go to the toilet.

What this means is that I am a lot less passionate about my job, and this is a good thing – certainly it is good for my health, but it’s not particularly brilliant for shifting my backside from the sofa to start pounding on the keyboard.

The other reason is that essentially I am starting from the bottom again. I like to think that my insights into ambulance work were reasonable because I was quite good at it and had been doing it for a while before I started writing about it. I am yet to feel ‘expert’ about nurse practitioning, although I am starting to see the patterns of patients that we get.

As confidentiality is a big issue, I can only write about these patterns and generalities so as to not have any possiblity of identifying patients.

I also wanted to spend the first few months at my new job keeping a low profile, sounding out the background and social structure of the place and generally trying to avoid trouble.

However, I’m now starting to get the itch to start blogging again because I’m starting to see the ways in which Urgent Care is used (and abused) and the way in which we fit into the community.

While Twitter has largely replaced my blogging, there are some things that deserve more than 140 characters.