In partnership with Health Education England, we held a conference focusing on dementia care. The evidence shows that dementia is now one of the leading causes of death, having overtaken heart disease (Public Health England, 2017), and the number of those experiencing the condition is projected to rise rapidly over the next decades. The conference hosted a range of speakers dedicated to improving the lives of those living with dementia, who covered best practice in care, raising awareness and lived experiences from a carer’s perspective.
For the first time, the Queen’s Nursing Institute’s (QNI’s) annual conference in 2016 was a two-day event, with a range of speakers on the twin themes of inspiring quality and success in nursing and on shaping the future of the nursing workforce. The speakers — from England, Wales and Northern Ireland — spoke about the various challenges facing the nursing workforce and some of the new initiatives that are being introduced to address them.
The experience of homelessness raises a person’s risk for a number of communicable diseases, long-term conditions, mental health issues and substance use. The trauma caused by fleeing from war and persecution and leaving the security of your home also has a profound impact on mental and physical health. Health outcomes for people from the Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities are among the poorest of any group, and sex workers have among the highest rates of drug addiction.
For researchers and policy-makers, nurses working in primary care are notoriously hard to reach; they are
without a management structure with a chief nurse or director of nursing at the top of the organisation, as is the case for their colleagues working in a community or hospital-based provider. So, when more than 3,400 general practice nurses (GPNs) recently completed a major Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) survey, it sent a clear message that the nurses had a story to tell.
The QNI has recently published two major pieces of work aimed at consolidating the academic and practice profile of district nurses. The district nursing profession has developed rapidly in recent years to keep pace with the growing complexity and acuity of care delivered in the home, and there was a growing fear that the supporting documentation had not kept pace.
Crystal Oldman is chief executive of the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI).
The QNI has just published its latest report into the Fund for Innovation and Leadership programme that it runs with support from the Burdett Trust for Nursing. The fund is one of the most practical and immediate ways in which we help nurses to develop a wide range of skills, and improve patient care in the community.
The Queen’s Nursing Institute is holding its next annual conference at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London on Monday 28 September. The programme will be announced shortly and we will be bringing together a range of key speakers from national and local healthcare organisations, to speak about the most urgent issues facing community nursing and primary health care today.
Through events and consultations held by the Queen’s Nursing Institute’s (QNI) homeless health network, community nurses are identifying emerging issues affecting their patients and their workforce.
