The title of Queen’s Nurse (QN) is open to all community nurses who want to demonstrate their commitment to client/patient-centred values and continually improving practice. Find out more.
Increasing demographic changes in the type and age of patients as well as further government directives requiring more care at home, mean that there is a growing emphasis on primary care-led services. Large caseloads and patients with multiple and chronic health problems are stretching available community nursing resources. Against this background, continence promotion tends not to be a priority and at times it may seem easier and better to prescribe pads for patients with urinary incontinence. This article provides community nurses with guidance on the initial assessment and management options available for patients who present with urinary incontinence. Many patients will subsequently experience improvement in their symptoms (although not always complete resolution), with a corresponding improvement in overall quality of life.
Community nurses offer holistic nursing care to patients at home, including attending to people with leg ulcers. It is known that leg ulcers can have a significant impact on patients’ quality of life. Nonetheless, little is known about community nurses’ views and experiences of providing holistic leg ulcer care and, in particular, their insights into the impact of leg ulcers on patients’ quality of life. Using a focus group of five healthcare support workers and four individual interviews with two associate nurses and two district nurses, this study explored community nurses’ experience of attending to patients with leg ulcers. Following transcription of the data, a thematic analysis was undertaken. It was concluded that community nurses need more training to support their work in leg ulcer management and more time to deliver patient-centred care.
Cellulitis is an acute bacterial infection of the skin and underlying subcutaneous tissue, mostly caused by Group A Streptococci (Mortimer, 2000; Cox, 2009) and Staphylococcus aureus (Hadzovic et al, 2012) (Figure 1). It can occur anywhere on the body, but most commonly affects the lower limb in 75–90% of cases (Tsao and Johnson, 1997).
People who are less mobile or have movement difficulties often spend longer periods of time sitting. It is, therefore, important to ensure that the seating being used is correct in terms of size and that adequate support is being provided to enable stability, comfort and function.
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.
