Patient Care
Patient care is provided in a variety of ways, below are a couple of examples of how ELF helps in this area.
ELF pays for a support specialist counsellor, Louise Page, who works from the Quiet room, situated in the Haematology Centre on a part time basis, of three days per week.
Support is given in many different forms and can be given face to face, or over the telephone and patients either refer themselves or are referred from a wide range of sources, e.g. G.P’s, ward staff, ELF staff, medical secretaries. Counselling sessions focus on problems and how to deal with them. Many patients benefit from learning relaxation techniques and visualisation skills as well as being able to talk about their thoughts and feelings in a supportive environment. Recently Louise started a bereavement group which provides support to relatives.
Although the NHS Trust recognises the importance of the counsellor’s role, it does not have the funds to support the cost of funding the role, therefore our charity has committed to funding this post to ensure that high levels of support are provided for those affected by Leukaemia and related diseases being treated at the RD&E.
ELF are constantly striving to improve patient care and as a result of this commitment we hope to launch a programme of Outreach Nursing.
Over the last fifteen to twenty years there has been a considerable evolution in the delivery of haematological care, most significantly, a move from in patient delivered treatments to outpatient and day case delivered treatment. This not only enables patients to have a much better quality of life it also benefits the hospital as well. However the provision of day case services is not without its problems. Given our geographical area, it can often involve frequent, long and expensive trips and can affect a patient’s decision for the frequency of treatments.
Treatment at home would help reduce the number of expensive time-consuming tiring journeys to hospital and could potentially reduce the incidents of treatments of their side effects, e.g. nausea related to coming into hospital or distress from seeing sick patients. Patients’ ability to retain important information regarding the prevention, early detection and treatment of side effects may also be better simulated in a more relaxed and informal setting
ELF has therefore agreed to provide, as a two year trial, an outreach nursing service to haematology patients being treated at the RD&E (Wonford). This will involve the employment of two nurses to work approximately 50% of their time in the unit and the remaining 50% providing an ‘outreach’ service to patients in their homes. The reason why we have two in situ is that we can then ensure that the post holders are rotated through the day case service and can facilitate communication between all parties involved in the patients’ care and to maintain the skills of the individuals who take up the posts.
This will be the first time an outreach service for haematology patients is available in the Southwest and will cost £75,000 per annum to deliver.