Innovation is at the heart of nursing
Marcus Stow, nurse, clinical leader and programme mentor, shares his reflections on his career and interest in innovation.
I knew I wanted to be a nurse from the age of four. I’m still not entirely sure why. Maybe it was all the hospital dramas and documentaries my parents watched when I was growing up. Maybe I was just drawn to the idea of helping people. Either way, by the time I got to school, I’d already decided nursing was what I wanted to do.
More than 30 years later, nursing has taken me far beyond anything I could have imagined back then.
I started my training at King’s College London in 1995, at a time when nursing degrees were still relatively unusual. Looking back, I was incredibly lucky. I had brilliant placements, excellent clinical focused teaching with people around me who pushed and supported me at the same time. When I qualified and started working at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, I genuinely felt ready, and eager, to practise.
But after a couple of years in cardiothoracics, I realised something important about myself. I need to keep learning.
That’s probably been the defining feature of my career. Whenever I felt my learning plateau, I looked for something new that would challenge me further. That mindset eventually led me into military nursing, where I spent 21 years moving between completely different environments and roles. Over that time, I worked in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, led teams, trained recruits, dealt with healthcare governance during an Ebola Pandemic, tasked aeromedical evacuations and eventually moved into healthcare innovation.
Looking back, I can see that some of the jobs I least wanted to do at the time ended up teaching me the most. At one stage, I ended up in an administrative headquarters role, hating the idea of it beforehand. I wanted to be operational. I wanted to be out doing things. But that role taught me how complex systems actually work, how leadership, bureaucracy, personalities and process all interact in healthcare organisations.
Another role took me into military training, managing large groups of young recruits from hugely varied backgrounds. Again, it wasn’t something I initially saw as part of my nursing identity, but it taught me an enormous amount about leadership, welfare and communication.
When I was younger, I thought I knew everything. Most of us do. But one of the things experience teaches you is that growth often happens in uncomfortable places. That’s why I always encourage nurses to keep moving, growing and learning. I don’t necessarily mean changing jobs every year or dramatically reinventing your career. Sometimes growth is much smaller than that such as teaching or spending time in another department. It might mean learning a new skill or taking on extra responsibility
Those opportunities matter, because nursing today is far broader than many people realise.
Nursing has a thousand doors
One of the biggest misconceptions about nursing is that people still imagine it as a fairly narrow profession. The reality is completely different.
Nursing has a thousand doors now. You can work in intensive care, mental health, surgery, community care, digital health, research, education, air ambulances, operational medicine, innovation, leadership or advanced clinical practice. You can move between specialities, build new expertise and reshape your career as you grow.
That variety is one of the reasons I still love nursing after all these years. There is always another skill to develop, another challenge to take on or another perspective to learn from. Importantly, nursing gives you something many professions don’t, you spend real time with people. Doctors often only see patients for a few minutes at a time. Nurses are the people who build rapport, understand concerns, solve practical problems and provide holistic care. That frontline understanding is incredibly valuable, especially when it comes to improving healthcare systems.
Nurses have always been innovators
People sometimes hear the word innovation and immediately think about robots, artificial intelligence or expensive new technology, but honestly, nurses have always innovated.
Throughout my military career, we were constantly adapting and overcoming problems. Sometimes that meant creating makeshift solutions in resource-poor environments. Sometimes it meant redesigning systems entirely. We didn’t always call it innovation. we just called it getting the job done.
That same mindset already exists throughout the NHS and wider healthcare. Nurses improve things every single day without necessarily recognising it as innovation. Moving equipment somewhere more practical, changing workflows to make patient care smoother, questioning why something is done a certain way. That is innovation.
For me, innovation is really about continuous improvement. It’s about creating environments where staff feel able to ask: could this work better?
Sometimes the answer is a huge transformation, but sometimes it’s simply moving a crash trolley 20 yards down a ward. The important thing is creating cultures where people are supported to improve things rather than being told, “We’ve always done it this way.”
I genuinely believe nurses are often best placed to identify problems because they spend so much time directly with patients, systems and workflows. If software slows people down, nurses know immediately. If a process is frustrating patients, nurses see it first. If a better system could save time, reduce stress or improve care, nurses are usually already thinking about it.
That’s one of the reasons I now spend so much of my time working in health innovation and mentoring clinicians through innovation programmes. I enjoy helping people take good ideas and turn them into something practical that improves healthcare, but equally, I learn from them as well. The younger clinicians and nurses coming through today are seeing problems differently, approaching challenges differently and bringing fresh perspectives into healthcare. That exchange of experience and new thinking is incredibly important.
Continuous improvement should be normal
If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my career, it’s that healthcare only improves when people are willing to question, adapt and learn. That applies whether you’re leading a major innovation programme or simply improving a process on your ward. Continuous improvement shouldn’t be viewed as something extra, it should be part of the culture of nursing. Not because nurses need more work to do – they absolutely do not – but because frontline staff are often the people best placed to improve the systems around them.
When those improvements work, the impact can be enormous. Better care, less frustration, safer environments and saved time. Sometimes even saved lives.
On International Nurses Day, I think it’s worth recognising that nursing has never been just one thing. It is a profession built on curiosity, resilience, adaptability and problem-solving. Some of the most important improvements in healthcare won’t necessarily come from boardrooms or technology companies. They’ll come from nurses asking a simple question. Could this work better?
