Sue Hill was previously a district nurse in the New Forest and is now the community nurse advisor for NHS England.
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.
We’ve grown used to reading headlines about the NHS on a daily basis recently — NHS in crisis; Casualty nightmare exposed; A&E performance dips to new lows — to the point where they start to lose their impact.
One of my New Year resolutions was to lose weight by the end of 2015. I’ve also vowed to start formally collecting my portfolio evidence in preparation for my own revalidation later in the year. I’m not entirely sure which of these resolutions it will be easier to stick to... Find out more.
Welcome to JCN’s learning zone. By reading the article in each issue, you can learn all about the key principles of subjects that are vital to your role as a community nurse. Once you have read the article, visit www.jcn.co.uk/learning-zone/ to evaluate your knowledge on this topic by answering the 10 questions in the e-learning unit; all answers can be found in the article. If you answer the questions correctly, you can download your certificate, which can be used in your continuing professional development (CPD) portfolio as evidence of your continued learning.
In each issue of the Journal of Community Nursing we investigate a hot topic currently affecting our readers. Here, Jason Beckford-Ball looks at icreased NHS privatisation and asks the question...
Student nurses have always learnt from qualified staff, in the past on the wards under matron and more recently on placement fro university. With job opportunities for nurses growing ever-more varied, Emily Carney explains what it was like to spend some time with a tissue viability team in Worcestershire...
In each issue of JCN we ask a clinical expert in a particular field to take a look at a therapy area and examine some everyday problems that community nurses may experience. In this issue, we investigate leg ulcer management....
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are one of the commonest infections seen in primary and secondary care and consequently are often treated with antibiotics. However, recently there has been an increasing amount of evidence highlighting the problem of bacterial resistance to antibiotics commonly used to treat UTI. This makes diagnosis and treatment even more critical. Diagnosis of a UTI can be difficult, especially in elderly patients, and poses many challenges for nurses, including those working in the community, particularly in nursing and residential homes. This article examines the adoption of a chemical indicator dipstick test. This demonstrated good correlation with urine culture results and was seen as a useful additional tool to assist in the diagnosis of UTI, especially in those patients where urine samples may be more difficult to capture.
