The majority of our patients can be safely treated within the eating disorder ward, allowing continued access to specialist psychological care alongside the specialist nursing support who are able to provide a high level of care.
At the heart of our ethos is the aim to support all patients to eat orally and support them to emotionally and psychologically. With this task, our team is able to offer supportive intervention such as Nasogastric tube/PEG feeding if required.
We are able to make sure appropriate pressure relieving equipment is available as prescribed.
Our team is able to perform a wide range of interventions both clinically and psychologically. Specialist dietetic, medical and psychiatric care is well integrated.
Access to individual, group and family psychological therapies is encouraged and tailored to individual patient and family needs.
When care in an acute medical setting is required, medical and eating disorder teams work closely together. Vincent Square is located next to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and over the years we have had the opportunity to build good working relationships with our medical colleagues. This allows us to safely support service users to access specialist medical treatment at times of exceptionally high levels of medical risk.
Care is led in partnership between specialist gastroenterology and eating disorder consultants.
Nursing support is provided by the eating disorder service, alongside acute hospital nursing care, to make sure of high quality nutritional, behavioral and psychological support.
Joint medical, psychiatric, dietetic and nursing review can be provided daily if required, and weekly as a minimum standard.
Excellent liaison between eating disorder and psychiatric liaison teams ensures excellent psychiatric cover out of hours.
Acute hospital care is minimised by the capacity for rapid transfer and effective joint working between eating disorder and acute hospital services.
For those being treated under the Mental Health Act, the eating disorder consultant provides continuity of the Responsible Officer role across the two services.