Earlier this summer, the QNI repeated a study it first carried out last year measuring the number of district nursing specialist
practitioner programmes (SPQ) being offered by UK universities, and the number of district nurses qualifying this summer.
In each issue of the Journal of Community Nursing we investigate a hot topic currently affecting our readers. Here, Jason Beckford-Ball looks at an issue that refuses to go away — end-of-life care — and asks the question...
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.
Did you know that over 3,000 people in the UK had a bone marrow or stem cell transplant in 2012? Around 1,400 of these were allograft transplants, where the patient receives blood stem cells from a donor — this could be from a sibling or an anonymous donor. Anthony Nolan is a pioneering charity that saves the lives of people with blood cancer and blood disorders. Every day, we use our register to match individuals willing to donate their bone marrow or blood stem cells to people who desperately need lifesaving transplants. But, for the patient, their journey doesn’t end at the point of transplant — a transplant patient is a patient for life and at Anthony Nolan we’re here to support those patients for as long as they need us.
What is a health visitor? What do they do? Indulge me for a moment and reflect on your immediate response to that question. Weighing babies was in there, wasn’t it? Don’t worry, you’re not alone — I recently asked a random sample of service users and healthcare professionals the same question and ‘weighing babies’ also featured highly in their perception of the health visitor’s role. Few could explain the role succinctly and most struggled to quantify exactly what it is we do. Indeed, my own health visitor colleagues had trouble explaining their jobs as they represent so many things to so many people.
This year, the global STOP Pressure Ulcer Day will take place on 20 November, 2014 with this day being set aside to bring awareness of the pain and suffering of the thousands of people who develop pressure ulcers each year.
The winners of the 2014 schülke hand hygiene champion awards were announced at the Infection Prevention Society (IPS) conference in Glasgow on 30 September. There were two joint winners — Mitch Clarke (Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham) and Claire Scott, (manager of the medical assessment unit, Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool) — who received exactly the same scores from the judges. The awards were presented by Julie Storr, the outgoing IPS president, on the 19schülke exhibition stand.
Each year there are a number of deaths associated with the winter flu virus and while last year’s figures may have been down on 2012/13, Gill Treverton says that community staff still need to promote the vaccine.
Pain is experienced by many patients in primary and secondary care and its assessment and management is a fundamental aspect of nursing treatment. Community nurses need to possess a strong knowledge base of the various ways of treating pain to inform and advise their patients. This in turn enables nurses to help and empower patients to effectively control their pain with minimal side-effects. This article, the second in a two-part series on pain, provides an update on the management of acute and chronic non-malignant pain (the first part of this article, on the assessment of pain, appeared in Journal of Community Nursing 28[4]: 83–86).
