Career profile: Sarah Kiernan, London

Sarah Kiernan is a consultant nurse in tissue viability at Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust, North London

How did you begin your career in nursing?

I wanted to work in travel and tourism so I worked at a travel agent before realising it wasn’t for me. My mum and aunts were nurses and they suggested I’d be able to travel with the work. I was qualified as a nurse by the mid-1980s and I worked in New York City on a coronary care unit on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, then in Dublin after that. I tried out a lot of different specialities and got to see the NHS, the American system and Ireland’s public and private systems, which are all very different.