As a national nursing service providing community nursing support for patients receiving enteral, parenteral nutrition and other intravenous therapies employing over 300 nurses, it was important to support the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic.
An NHS support campaign was launched which began by implementing a guiding principle across our service in relation to sending patients to hospital. The guiding principle was framed around keeping the patient at home safely to avoid admission. The guiding principle was: ‘why hospital, why today’. This was communicated out across our nursing service and our standard operating procedures were updated to reflect this.
To help raise awareness to this initiative we also launched a logo. This was added to the email footers of the nursing team and shared with our NHS partner hospitals. We increased the nursing service offering to further support admission prevention, to include the following:
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Blood taking visits
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Additional drug administration
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Virtual patient assessments and training
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Support/facilitate virtual clinics
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Condensed patient training to aid reduced number of visits for training
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Rapid discharge for nursed patients
We reduced the number of nursing visits our patients were having to reduce the risk through contact:
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Patients were offered training for themselves or a carer
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Where clinically safe and in agreements with the referring centres and our patients, we reduced patient’s visits to once a day from twice per day by administering 24-hour infusions, thus reducing contact and exposure to nurses and patients
We offer a 24hour nurse Advise Line to support our patients and nurses in the community. As part of the ‘Why Hospital Why Today ‘initiative, the Advice Line worked hard to find ways to keep patients safely at home rather than advising hospital, along with discussions with the manager on call were able to reduce the number of out of hours hospital admissions.
We also considered our patients mental health and well-being. Our patient cohort is a vulnerable group and they were being isolated from family and friends as well as reduced nursing visits which could impact on their mental health and well-being. We initiated weekly supportive calls to all our patients which were well received.
During 2020 at the height of the pandemic, 27 hospital admissions were avoided, 6 patients completed the condensed patient training package, 160 patients had amendments to their prescription regime to reduce number of nurse visits, 63 patients initiated 24-hour parenteral nutrition infusions, halving their contact with nurses.