Posted on: 29 July 2024
On his first day as Chief Nursing Officer for England, Duncan Burton visits CNWL’s Camden Community Services.
Duncan said, “Community services play a vital role in enabling people to be cared for in their homes or close to home – so it was a privilege to visit community services at CNWL for my first visit as Chief Nursing Officer for England.
“I learned about the important work of colleagues in the COPD [Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – known as emphysema or chronic bronchitis] and Home Oxygen, Heart Failure, and Palliative Care teams and it was valuable to listen to their views on what is important for the future of health and care.”
On arrival, Duncan was met by CNWL’s Chief Nurse, Helen Willetts:
“We were lucky enough to be able to meet with Duncan on his first day as the Chief Nursing Officer for England. We spoke about the vital nature of nursing in community and mental health settings, attracting people into nursing, developing nursing careers and nurse leadership. Duncan was interested to hear about our various leadership development opportunities, for example the Chief Nurse Fellowship programme. He was also interested to hear about the CNWL SCARF philosophy and some of the work we are doing on offering safe and quality care.”
Pamela Akorley, Head of Camden Adult Integrated Services, took Duncan on the tour of Camden’s Community Nursing Teams.
The first stop on the tour was to meet the Heart Failure Team. Rosemary Fernandez, Clinical Lead Heart Failure Service. Rosemary spoke about the work they do with virtual wards to help treat patients at home and avoid admission in to hospitals. Virtual wards enable patients to be monitored regularly like they would at hospital with home visits and devices that monitor their health.
Rosemary said, “Our patients prefer to be treated closer to home with care being moved out of hospitals, the virtual wards are becoming more important to achieve this. We work with other services such as Palliative Care and Camden Rapid Access teams to ensure patients are treated where they want to, mostly at home.”
Duncan then met Heidi Ridsdle, Clinical Lead and Manager for COPD.
Heidi talked about the innovative approaches adopted by her team, one being, having a Smoking Cessation Behaviour Change Specialist embedded in the team to deliver a 12-week programme, resulting in quit rates of 70% and higher. This is 35% above the national average quit rate.
Heidi spoke about how her team is professionally agnostic, a term used to describe a team whose members all have skills in more than one area. Heidi said, “When we recruit we look at the person and upskill them into a specialism within the team. Having nurses and physiotherapists from different backgrounds allows our team to learn more from each other and diversifies the care and expertise we give to our patients without taking away that specialist expertise to one area.”
Nigel Dodds, Nurse Consultant, along with his colleague Shauna O’Connor, Social Work and Therapies Lead, talked to Duncan about their work in the Community Palliative Care Team.
The team is led by nurses but is multidisciplinary with therapists, social workers and physiotherapists all working together. The team has a joint strategy with another NHS Trust, UCLH, they work closely with them on a regular basis to be ready to support patients in the community with their palliative care.
Nigel spoke about the way his team communicates their patients’ needs with other healthcare professionals (like paramedics) that might be called to assist their patients. They utilise a new system called the Universal Healthcare Plan. When a healthcare worker looks up a patient’s profile on the NHS’ database, the Universal Healthcare Plan will flash up so they can see their team’s notes on how to care for their patient in critical times.
Duncan asked all the staff he met on his visit what he could do for them in his new role, all teams mentioned the need to invest in our nurses with learning and education. They collectively spoke of the need to promote what community work involves and encourage newly qualified nurses to start working in the community with students having placements on wards as well as in the community as part of their core training.
Before leaving, Pam took Duncan to an inpatient ward at St Pancras where he met a first-year nursing student, Parvathy Kumar from the University of Middlesex. Parvathy said, “I wanted to get into nursing because I love caring for people, I cared for my grandma and this is why I wanted to become a nurse.”
Similarly to staff from CNWL’s community teams, training was an important topic, Parvathy spoke about how training can be improved with more practical learning.