Last summer, I was attending a wedding, when an elderly guest collapsed at her table.
Within seconds, a nurse who happened to be a guest was on the floor beside her, calm and precise, checking her breathing, talking her back to consciousness. The lady was okay. She was breathing. She was looked after by exactly the right person, doing exactly the right thing.
I wasn’t that person. I’m not a clinician. I’ve never had to give CPR or attend to broken bones, or delivered a training course in my life, and I hope I’m never the only option standing between someone and an ambulance.
But I didn’t sit back down either. I stood close and watched. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I ran through what I’d do if I needed to. Not because I’m trained to lead in that moment, but because I’ve completed yearly refreshers at ECG for the past 6 years as part of our internal mandatory training requirements. That feeling of knowing I would be confident to step in was because someone built it into me, one repetitive but engaging annual session at a time.
That moment has stayed with me, because it’s the clearest possible argument for something I now spend my working life thinking about: training isn’t really about the day you use it. It’s about every ordinary day before that, quietly making sure you’d be ready if you ever had to.
An unlikely CV for someone who believes in this
I didn’t come up through healthcare. My path has been retail management, account management, an executive assistant, and before that I trained as a dancer, and after that a Make up Artist. Now I’m an Assistant Operations Director at a company that trains healthcare professionals.
On paper, none of that qualifies me to have opinions about clinical competency. But every one of those roles taught me the same lesson from a different angle: skill isn’t something you have once. It’s something you keep, through repetition, feedback, and a bit of discomfort.
Dancers train the same movement hundreds of times until the body does it without thinking. Retail management is relentless, unglamorous repetition of standards until they become instinct rather than effort. Doing makeup taught me that technique only becomes art once it’s practiced past the point of self-consciousness. None of these are life-or-death. But they gave me a genuine respect for the mechanics of readiness. The boring, repeated work that sits underneath anyone’s ability to perform under pressure.
I’ll say the quiet part out loud: a lot of clinicians don’t relish their mandatory training. I understand why. It can feel repetitive, a box to tick between patients, a day pulled away from the job they actually trained for. Nobody signs up to be a nurse or paramedic because they’re excited about their annual BLS refresher.
But that’s exactly the point the wedding made so plainly to me. The nurse who acted that day didn’t reach for a memory of the last time she’d needed those skills in an emergency, she reached for the version of herself built by every routine session she’d sat through in between. The training doesn’t feel urgent in the room. It only proves itself urgent in the moment you didn’t choose, on a day you didn’t expect, when there’s no time to look anything up.
Training that saves someone’s life is very rarely dramatic while it’s happening. It’s dull, it’s scheduled, it’s slightly annoying to fit into a rota. And then, once every few years, it’s the only reason someone’s grandmother is still at the next family wedding.
Where I fit in, as someone who’ll never deliver the training myself
I’ll never run a BLS session. That’s not my job, and it shouldn’t be. My job, as Assistant Ops Director, is to make sure the conditions exist for that training to actually happen, consistently, for the people who need it. As a team, we build relationships with our clients and customers, we manage the scheduling, the resourcing, the follow-through, the small operational decisions that mean a session runs smoothly, the venue is right, and everyone and everything is where it needs to be when it needs to be there. We stay flexible to our clients’ needs, and we’re led by our COO, Sophie McCracken, an experienced paramedic who makes sure the training content is never just a slide deck of information to get through. She makes sure the training materials are engaging, clinically accurate, and built to stick, the kind of training people actually remember when it counts.
I think about that wedding often. Not because I did anything, I didn’t, but because it’s the clearest proof I have that training given without enthusiasm can still be the difference between panic and calm competence. My job is to make sure as many people as possible get that chance to be ready, even when they’d perhaps rather be doing something else with their day.
I’m still not a clinician, but I’ll always feel ready to stand close and step in if I am ever needed.
Natalie Abrams
Assistant Operations Director
