Multi-Professional Healthcare… It’s In The Name!

Cliff Kilgore is a Consultant Nurse for Intermediate Care and Older People within Dorset Healthcare NHS Trust and he is also a Visiting Fellow to Bournemouth University. He is Chair of the BGS Nurses and Allied Healthcare Professionals Council. He also is a member of the BGS Clinical Quality Steering Group. He tweets @kilgore_cliff

As the BGS celebrates 70 years of improving health care for older people, I thought it would be helpful to consider one of the reasons it has been so successful…

There are many of course that have had influence on older people’s wellbeing. I don’t claim that the BGS is the only organisation that is striving to bring excellence to older peoples’ health care, but I do feel that by its nature, the BGS does capture something of the real life working of a multi-professional team, which is the spine of caring for any older person. I have always been a strong advocate for ‘real world’ practice, whether considering research or organisational structure. Real world practice is how many front-line clinicians describe what happens when they see patients.

The Older Person’s Nurse Fellowship Conference 2016: Bridging the gap between research and practice through nurse-led quality improvement in older person’s services

Dr Corina Naughton, is a senior lecturer in the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Kings College London. Corina is joint Lead for the Older Person’s Nurse Fellowship programme. She tweets at @corina_naughton

This was the first year of the Older Person’s Nurse Fellowship (OPNF) conference, hosted by the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, King’s College London, in collaboration with Health Education England (HEE). The conference brought together leading older persons’ nurse research and front-line nurse-led quality improvement initiatives undertaken by senior clinical nurses from the OPNF programme. The conference was chaired By Baroness Sally Greengross and Sir Keith Person (Chair HEE).

The Skin I’m In

Fiona Cowdell is a Reader in Wellbeing in Long-Term Conditions at the University of Hull and a nurse. She’s about to begin a National Institute for Health Research Knowledge Mobilisation Research Fellowship. Fiona has dual interests in applied clinical research with a focus on older people and skin health and in methods of moving research from academia to patients and clinicians. She tweets at @fionacowdell 

I’m writing this blog by way of thanking the British Geriatric Society for awarding me a Nurses Study Grant to attend the recent Royal College of Nursing & BGS joint Older People’s Conference in Birmingham.

We are all familiar with ageing, either from your own experience or from working with patients. We know older people are often unjustly or unconsciously labelled. I research skin health and well-being in older people and I can’t help myself but to talk about this; it’s not for everyone but it fascinates me!

Their death: their story

Katie Wells is a Senior Staff Nurse who has worked with older people for 20 years, and couldn’t think of a more satisfying specialty. Here she explains her work to highlight the benefits of Advance Care Planning, and how the death of her Nan made her want to change the role of ward-based nurses to help patients plan for the future.

With so many older people in their last years of life being admitted into acute hospitals, contact with hospital staff gives us a golden opportunity to develop good relationships with both patients and families. These relationships can allow us to make the time to initiate structured conversations surrounding the care and support patients wish to receive at their End of Life.

What actually is frailty?

Chris Beech is a Nurse Consultant at NHS Forth Valley, Falkirk. She is member of the BGS Specialist Nurse and Allied Health Professionals Special Interest Group.

Frailty is all around us, especially when you take a quick peek at the recent literature on working with older people. It is important that nurses working with older people in all care settings are aware of what frailty is, what the implications are if someone is identified as living with frailty and what, if anything, can be done about it.

We all have a picture in our head of a frail person, the problem is that there is a big chance that this picture is a different image to the one the person sitting next to you is thinking of. It is important therefore to have the ability to put an objective view point into play.

Why I Chose Geriatric Nursing as My Specialty

BGS blog followers may be interested in this article Why I Chose Geriatric Nursing as My Specialty from the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing blog.

I never considered specializing in geriatric nursing before my academic career at New York University mainly because I have had limited interactions with the elderly.  My maternal grandparents died while trying to escape the Vietnam War and my paternal grandparents lived out in the Midwest so I rarely saw them.  It wasn’t until last summer that I was able to connect to geriatrics on a more personal level.

At the tail end of summer 2013, I volunteered with the medical relief organization, Floating Doctors, which provides healthcare and medical treatment to isolated coastal communities in Panama.   They also worked locally with a live-in geriatric facility, the asilo, by providing regular visits to conduct check-ups and physical assessments, administer medications as well as offer companionship to the residents.  For the most part, the residents were in good health and mentally present.  However, open sores, scabies, dementia, and debilitation were common afflictions.

The full article can be read on the Hartford Institute for Geriatric Nursing blog.

Providing quality end of life care to older people dying in nursing care homes in the UK. Are we are asking the impossible?

Julie Kinley is a Nurse Consultant for care homes at St Christopher’s Hospice Care Home Project and Research team.

It is rare for any positive publicity to emerge from care homes these days. Press reports about care tend to be generally negative regardless of care setting, as illustrated by the recent Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundations Trust Public Inquiry report and the report More care less pathway, a review of the Liverpool Care Pathway’ by Julia Neuberger. Since there are three times as many beds in care home as there are in the NHS, there is actually an increased chance of such adverse publicity emerging from a care home setting.

Francis Report – A Nursing Perspective

Jane Buswell is Chair of the BGS Specialist Nurse and Senior Practitioners Group

On reading the Francis report one might be misled into thinking that the report points to nurses as having sole responsibility for delivering compassionate care and that the only professionals delivering care within the NHS are nurses and doctors. It is unfortunate that the significant role of our Allied Health Professional colleagues within the multi-disciplinary team, and their potential for leadership, has not been recognised in this wide ranging and seminal report.

It would be wrong to look at the individual professional recommendations in isolation. Only 33 of the 209 recommendations are specific to nursing. However, many of these are addressing the same issues of leadership, training, regulation, professional accountability and the roles of our professional bodies, all of which apply equally to doctors, and all other professionals within the NHS.