#ChooseGeriatrics celebrates the variety, excitement and rewards of professional roles in older people’s healthcare.
For our second annual #ChooseGeriatrics week between 1 and 7 June 2026, we're sharing inspiring new blogs written by people from across the multidisciplinary team who have chosen to work in older people’s healthcare.
Lucy Lewis, former Chair of the BGS NAHPs Council, shares an insight into her career, while also delving into why these blogs are so important.
The #ChooseGeriatrics blog series is incredibly encouraging. Each professional has taken the time to write inspiring accounts of how they moved into the specialism of older people’s healthcare and, importantly, why they stay.
My own journey was not straightforward. A surgical/cancer care nurse/sister/research nurse/high dependency/specialist nurse-hybrid nurse practitioner for a decade, I thought my career plan was to become a carcinoid tumour consultant nurse, a job I don’t think existed at the time, but my goal was set.
Life events overtook me, and part way through my Masters in Advanced Practice (Cancer Care Pathway), we welcomed our now 16-year-old son into the world. For various reasons, the role I was doing as an Upper Gastrointestinal Support Sister wasn’t right for the season we were in as a new family. I was given the opportunity to become a hospital discharge facilitator, gaining valuable insight into the Continuing Healthcare Funding process before becoming an older person’s practitioner.
I switched my MSc to a standard pathway and started focusing my assignments on my new speciality, hitting the ground running clinically and academically. I wrote a work-based assignment on the impact of transferring people living with dementia around the hospital multiple times. It was full of language which I would be horrified by now. The marking lecturer quite rightly put her red pen through the phrase “frail elderly bed”.
I led a project on “listening clinics”, firstly completing a literature review on the topic, then working with the consultant geriatrician team to complete a pilot project, resulting in my first BGS conference experience: two posters at Brighton 2015. From here, I undertook a frailty-focused Quality Improvement Fellowship, gained a place on the coveted Health Education England South East Consultant Practitioner Development Programme (Frailty and Older People Pathway), and received a Florence Nightingale Foundation scholarship, taking me around Scotland to view Health Improvement Scotland’s inspiring frailty-focused projects; to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to visit Ken Rockwood and his team; and to the University of Toronto’s clinical academic team focusing on oncology in later life.
Meanwhile, annual BGS conferences and quarterly Nurse AHP Council meetings at Marjorie Warren House not only confirmed I was in the right speciality, but also that I had found my people: all doing their best in a challenging system to improve healthcare for older people clinically, through research, quality improvement, policy, and leadership.
Now, six years into my role as a consultant nurse, having completed the three-year training programme during the pandemic, I have taken time to support my recently widowed dad as he has undergone his own experiences of healthcare, as has my 95-year-old mother-in-law with her increased care needs. This has also given me the much-needed protected time to be a full-time PhD student, focusing my research on how older individuals, their significant others, and healthcare professionals make decisions following a cancer diagnosis.
Whatever I do next, I know there will be plenty of opportunities, as in our specialty there will always be much work to do. Please do take the time to read these blogs and tell us: why did you #ChooseGeriatrics?
