Hannah Jennings
Meet Hannah, a Child Protection Nurse who has built a career dedicated to protecting children and supporting her fellow healthcare professionals. Her journey is a powerful example of how passion, empathy, and experience can come together to make a lasting difference.
| Current job role | A Child Protection Nurse Specialist and Lead Trainer for East and North Hertfordshire NHS Teaching Trust |
|---|---|
| Year of graduation | 2016 |
| Course of study | BSc (Hons) Nursing (Child) |
A specialist role with a big impact
Since graduating from Herts, Hannah has built a meaningful and dynamic career in child protection nursing. She currently works as a Child Protection Nurse Specialist and Lead Trainer for East and North Hertfordshire NHS Teaching Trust, based at Lister Hospital.
Her role is varied and vital. She is part of an on-call rota facilitating attendance at multi-professional meetings alongside social care, police, and other healthcare professionals to assess the risk of harm to children and young people in the community. Where necessary, she and her team facilitate child protection medicals following these meetings.
In addition to her clinical responsibilities, she supports staff across three hospitals, providing advice, supervision, and guidance on safeguarding issues. She also helps run a paediatric liaison service to ensure appropriate information sharing between hospital and community healthcare professionals.
As the Lead Trainer, she develops and delivers statutory and mandatory safeguarding training, ensuring all staff are equipped and confident to deal with child protection concerns. 'My job as lead trainer means I develop and deliver statutory and mandatory training, as well as any other emerging themes that I feel staff would benefit from having additional training,' she explains. 'I am also responsible for ensuring staff are up to date and compliant with training to ensure staff are equipped to deal with safeguarding concerns.'
How Herts helped shape her path
Her passion for safeguarding began during her studies at Herts. ‘I spent some time with the safeguarding team when I was a student. I really enjoyed learning more about the importance of safeguarding and had some cases at the time which have stuck with me.’
After qualifying, she initially worked in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), where her enthusiasm for teaching and supporting others began to grow. ‘I’m really passionate about teaching and training, which stems from my placements in NICU where my mentor and all the staff were so supportive and knowledgeable,’ she says. ‘As a specialist nurse, you have the ability to support others with additional knowledge they may not be as confident with.’
When a secondment opportunity arose in the safeguarding team, she decided to pursue it and found her true calling. ‘Although I kind of fell into safeguarding unexpectedly, it’s been a lovely mix of all my passions being intertwined with the training aspect and some clinical care being continued with the child protection medicals and the acute cases we support.’
Supporting others and looking ahead
While she’s very happy in her current role, her passion for child protection continues to grow. She has a particular interest in child exploitation and has recently developed a toolkit to help identify cases in acute hospital settings. Her goal is to expand this work nationally. ‘It would be great to implement it across other Trusts (which it has already begun to be),’ she says.
She also hopes to do more to support student nurses, inspired by her own experiences during training. ‘I had a really tough period of time during my training, and I now want to be a supportive mentor or nurse to those who may be struggling. It would be good to look at an emotional wellbeing project or buddy scheme to support nursing students where they feel they need someone to reach out to for advice other than their mentor or lecturers.’
Her advice for current students is full of compassion and honesty: ‘Any lived experiences you have will make you a better nurse. Your weaknesses will actually turn into your strengths. It’s totally ok and so normal to sometimes feel overwhelmed at uni, but talk to someone, a friend, your family, a lecturer, the uni counselling service! A problem shared truly is a problem halved.’