All images by Xue Qi Ow Yeong for RICE Media.
As an avid Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) player, I often wish reality had the touch of magic that games offer. How nice it would be to have that sense of fantasy intertwining with real life, to see how the jobs in the game mirror the ones in our world.
If I could hazard a guess, customer service roles could be the Barbarians, tanking damage from demanding members of the public. Pet groomers could be Druids, specialising in interacting with animals. In that same vein, nurses are the de facto Cleric class. They’re healers, right?
But when I say this to Cheryl Cai Linghua, a nurse-career coach-mentor-teacher all in one, the look on her face lets me know I’ve got it completely wrong.
Neonatal ICU, Emergency, Palliative, Community Care; Cheryl rattles off a list of nurse specialisations.
“And each specialisation has its own unique character,” chides Cheryl. “Nursing is just a generic term.”
Choose Your Character
Cheryl is a Senior Nurse Educator at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital (KTPH), a member of the National Healthcare Group (NHG). If there’s anyone who knows the ins and outs of the nursing specialisations out there, she’s the one.
When I first met her, she struck me with an aura of sage wisdom—her calm voice and gentle smile put me at ease. She holds herself in a posture of dignified repose—like a Guild Master who does the behind-the-scenes work of nurturing adventurers of all levels.
In this case, she’s in charge of sending young hopefuls onto their journey of nurse specialisations they were destined for.
Part of Cheryl’s job involves running ‘tutorial missions’: helping student nurses and new hires put their theoretical knowledge into practice. The Nursing Simulation Lab at KTPH has a gamut of mannequins, machinery, and more; giving aspiring nurses the chance to try their hands at administering CPR or intubating a patient.
She also checks in on each nurse as they progress along their adventures, offering nuggets of wisdom and additional training to help them advance their skill levels.
Cheryl’s Nursing Adventure
Her breadth of knowledge is born from experience. Cheryl was once a junior nurse (or in gaming terms, a starting adventurer) when she was offered a nursing scholarship—an opportunity to leave her home country of China and come to Singapore to study.
Her path began when she started work at an orthopaedic-surgical ward. There, she had chances to assist neurosurgical (brain and spine) patients with complex issues. This experience piqued her interest to pursue a specialisation in neuroscience. However, due to a lack of student intake that year, she chose to further her studies in orthopaedics.
She tells me: “Because of my years of experience and knowledge in orthopaedics, I had opportunities to guide and coach junior nurses and learners of different levels. I then realised ‘Hey, I love teaching’—I love sharing my knowledge and skills with junior nurses.”
The love for teaching led Cheryl to specialise in Nursing Education. She now mentors nursing graduates from the various Institutes of Higher Learning, nurses from other countries, and mid-career switchers from all walks of life.
Cheryl’s path is just one example of how versatile nursing is. Just as D&D characters can choose different classes, slipping into different roles at different times; nurses don’t have fixed specialisations. While every nurse may start work at a certain ward or speciality, they can choose to pursue a different specialisation based on their career interests and experience.
Anyone Can Be A Nurse
While we might be tempted to think of nursing as a single-faceted career path, the truth is that nursing attracts people from all backgrounds. Whether introverted or extroverted, detail-oriented or big-picture, anyone can be a nurse if they have the education and professional qualifications.
“There is no prescribed personality for someone to be a nurse,” Cheryl tells me, but there are certain traits that make up a great nurse.
Clear communication is one. “It’s not just about how clear we are,” she explains, “but also how we connect with our patients to make sure that they trust us and feel safe to share their healthcare needs or the problems that they’re having.”
Nurses also have to keep up with the changes that innovation continues to bring to healthcare. In a constantly changing world where technological development and innovation happen rapidly, digital literacy and adaptability are essential skills for nurses.
They have to be willing to grow and learn, whether through the upskilling that hospitals provide as part of their training plans, or through more informal means—Cheryl notes a lot of nursing skills are picked up through hands-on experience with patients.
She recalls: “As a junior nurse, I was awed by senior nurses who could take one look at a wound and immediately tell you what the problem is and what treatment is needed. You can be the best wound care nurse, even without formal training.”
Most importantly: “I think anybody who has the heart, and is able to serve our patients and the community with compassion, will do well,” says Cheryl. Anyone can be a great nurse if they’ve got that willingness to learn, the ability to communicate, and the heart to serve.
Cheryl’s Favourite Nursing Classes
Beyond the basics, it’s hard to generalise. There are many different nurse specialisations in Singapore, each with its own proficiencies. In lieu of asking Cheryl about all of them, I asked her to tell me a bit about her favourite ones.
She shares about how Neonatal ICU nurses help not just tiny newborns but also their worried parents. She also mentions Palliative Care nurses, who often tend to patients during their end-of-life care. Both are emotionally trying specialisations that require both empathy and resilience, Cheryl explains.
“These are the most delicate specialisations—I can’t see myself in them,” Cheryl sheepishly admits. “I’m easily sentimental, so I think I’d be in tears every day. I don’t know if I can handle those emotions.”
Then there are Community Care nurses who travel out to render care in a patient’s home. These patients, who often live alone, tend to be isolated from society. These nurses bring light and hope to their lives.
Beyond just providing nursing care within the comfort of their homes, Community Care nurses also serve as a connection to society—providing patients with much-needed social engagement and support. More than just caregivers, they also serve as a listening ear and source of emotional support.
This close connection helps them with a different aspect of their jobs—diagnosing problems quickly and critically. Community nurses can’t bring a whole hospital’s resources with them, so they have to work independently, solve problems on the spot, and have the foresight to anticipate issues that might arise when patients are left alone to manage their own care.
Cheryl goes on to share about Emergency nurses and how they constantly deal with a range of urgent cases.
Cheryl laughs as she recalls: “When I was young, I dreamed of becoming an emergency nurse. I was inspired by TV dramas!”
“The emergency department is thrilling, very exciting and always unpredictable; you have to act very quickly and be very good in your domain knowledge and skills. But of course, in reality, there aren’t so many romance stories.”
While I listen to Cheryl go on, it’s clear the term ‘nurse’ isn’t very specific. It could refer to pretty much every single specialisation there is under the large domain of healthcare.
And it’s clear different nurses have different skill trees (or unlocked skills and specialisations).
Community Care nurses, for their breadth of knowledge, might not have an in-depth understanding of the challenges a premature baby has to overcome—something a Neonatal nurse spends years understanding.
As Cheryl puts it: “I think every specialisation has its beauty and challenges.”
Perhaps the most meaningful part of Cheryl’s job as a nurse educator is seeing how all these different skills from different specialisations come together for the same goal: providing care to patients and their loved ones.
A Constant Adventure
Imbuing the field with a little bit of D&D fantasy has helped me understand the intricate framework of nursing.
They do more than their starter quests of common nursing tasks like cleaning up after patients. They’re constantly ‘adventuring’; be it to patients’ homes across the country, or to different specialisations.
In the course of their adventures, they get plenty of chances to gain experience and level up. A nurse might choose to put all their experience points into one specialisation, honing and sharpening a specific set of skills. Others might choose to multiclass instead, jumping from specialisation to specialisation as their interests and life circumstances dictate. The world of nursing is flexible enough that it allows for a variety of career paths.
And with that, our tutorial mission is over. Cheryl has to bid me farewell. Duty calls, and she has a packed day ahead of her. Maybe she’s going to help some new nurses level up for their nursing journey ahead. Or maybe she’s off to prep some equipment for her nursing tutorials and classes.
Whatever her new quest is, I’m sure it involves making a significant difference in the lives of others.
