Tonight we want to think about Spirituality : What’s the big deal?Why is it important in the last years, months, weeks or days of life?What do we understand it to be?Who provides it?What do you think?Hello my name is Joy (@Joywharton1) and I work as a Specialist Palliative Care Nurse in an Acute Trust in Cumbria. I’m an Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Non- Medical Prescriber and am absolutely passionate about all things palliative. I love learning and sharing and find lots of inspiration and support from friends on Twitter.Hello my name is Ed (@edwardnorthey) and I am the Lead Hospital Chaplain at Furness General Hospital in Barrow in Furness, part of University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay (@UHMBT). I believe strongly in professional collab ...

Pre Chat Information written by Teresa Chinn A few weeks ago I read a blog by Zoe Bojelian that really made me stop and think, it was around how some people live life walking hand in hand with death and the emotional impact this can have on them.  Zoe very eloquently explained that how living with a life limiting or life threatening condition often means that friendships are made with people with similar conditions and the huge psychological and emotional toll this can have. I really don't do the blog post any justice and I recommend that you read the blog post:    Death - let's be more open, more kind, more caring.     For me this raised many thoughts and questions, which I hope we can explore in this #WeNurses discussion:What is the impac ...

This 2014 BBC report refers to the death of Stephanie Bincliffe.   Stephanie had autism, and she died in an Assessment and Treatment Unit (ATU) in 2013 from heart problems and sleep apnoea related to obesity (she was 10st over weight).  She had been detained since the age of 18 after ‘attacking a boy in a supermarket’ and according to the inquest there were no plans in place to address her weight gain and self harm.  She lived an unhealthy and unfulfilled life, remaining in a padded room for much of the time.  Her family claim that she did not leave the room for the last two years of her life, using a bedpan and washing herself with wet wipes.The service spokeswoman said: “The issue for the clinical staff was that if food served was not wha ...

Greetings Aussie pharmacists, international friends and welcome to the #WePhOz community!@WePharmerOz next Tweet chat is all about "Delivering COPD screening services in community pharmacy" in conjunction with the @LungFoundation Australia to explore the opportunities, resources and experience available to benefit consumers in our communities. The chat is taking place using the hashtag #wephoz on Wednesday 5th of October @ 8pm (EST). So hear are some initial questions to get you thinking:- Lets explore the incidence of lung disease in Australia, where are the opportunities for community pharmacists intervention?- Screening services, what are some examples, experiences and success stories?- education and training necessary for pharmacist and ...

Specialist Community Public Health Nurse - School Nurse This is what you will be at the end of a year's worth of learning. Theoretical and practical/clinical based learning will enable you, an already registered nurse/midwife, to meet the NMC professional standards for specialist community public health nurses (Health Visiting, School Nursing or Sexual Health Adviser). You will be looking to use all of this new knowledge and skill to support children, young people, families and communities to be the best they can be.You will be working within the four principles of public health practice: •searching for health needs•stimulation of awareness of health needs• influencing policies affecting health•facilitating health enhancing activitiesWe re ...

The Glasgow ComaScale (GCS) is the gold standard for assessment and decision making in patients with acute neurological conditions at risk of deterioration (Teasdale and Jennett 1974; Middleton 2012; Teasdale et al 2014). Developed in 1970, it continues to be used to assess the level of consciousness in these patients. It is fundamental that nurses have the knowledge that underpins this assessment and are able to identify deterioration when it occurs but: When was the last time you were taught about how toperform a GCS assessment correctly?How confident do we feel?When you report and document your findings, do you use the score and/or do you use the scale? Throughout the years, peripherally and centrally applied painful stimuli have been th ...

With the start of a new academic term the @WeNurses team have decided to celebrate and welcome new student nurses to Twitter. We would like to bring students, registered nurses and academics together to answer the question 'Twitter: Whats in it for you?'. There is a wealth of knowledge and information which Healthcare Professionals and Students share on twitter. In some universities Twitter and Digital professionalism is part of the curriculum https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/schools/school-of-nursing-and-midwifery/punc , and in other universities students curate Twitter accounts and support other students through social media, one such account is @nursingSUni .Some new student nurses question why we use Twitter and can't see the benefits of usin ...

ContextNurses that care for children are required to keep up to date with current and best practice in regards to pain management. As the NMC Code (2015) states that all nurses must care to high standard, nurses must be able to assess the pain of children with cognitive impairment [CI] as effectively as children without CI. Evidence based guidelines should be utilized to deliver high-quality pain management through the appropriate use of prevention, assessment, and treatment methods (Department of Health [DH], Department for Education and Skills [DES], 2004). DH (2004) considers the self-reporting of pain to be gold-standard for the assessment of pain, however this presents a challenge for children with CI who are unable to self-report due ...

There are 3,000 people with learning disabilities and/or autistic spectrum disorder who are in an inpatient setting for the purposes of assessment, care and treatment in the UK, 83% of whom were admitted under the Mental Health Act (1983)[1].  In 2012 the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP 2014) concluded that the focus for clinical quality audits of ATUs should be cultural change, both at the level of organisations and individual healthcare workers, and on the experience of people with a learning disability,their families and carers.Monday 18th April 2016 saw the start of a week-long campaign which made use of social media to raise awareness about the experiences of people who were receiving healthcare in ATU settings.  The campaign messa ...

The Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE) is launching a new learning campaign highlighting the role the pharmacy team can play in urgent care.Urgent or unplanned care leads to at least 100 million NHS calls or visits each year, which represents about one third of overall NHS activity and more than half the costs.  Approximately one quarter of accident and emergency attendances could have been treated elsewhere. NHS England’s Urgent and emergency care review is now its implementation phase and it is important that pharmacy professionals are involved in developing new systems. Pharmacy teams in all sectors have potential to support the urgent care agenda by raising awareness of existing services, extending those services and bein ...

October 19th is Change Day – a day when healthcare professionals are asked to look around and see what can be improved, what small, or big, changes we can make to  the care we deliver.  This #FabChangeDay discussion is the second in a series of change focussed Twitter Chats (to read the first please click HERE) and will take place on Change Day itself. We will be asking how can we sustain energy for change?There is always a lot of energy around Change Day, lots of tweets, lots of pledges and lots of events however we all know that change is not a one day process,  Gbadamosi (2015) identifies 10 barriers to change:Confusing strategiesOver controlling leadershipOne way communicationPoor workforce planningStifling innovationPlaying it safePoor ...

Join us to discuss pharmacy's place and role in delivering the aims of the Carter report. Lord Carter's report into variation across the NHS was published in October 2015 and can be found here. The report explains that hospitals can save around £5 billion by reducing variation and improving the way they care for patients; this comes after the activity carried out by all NHS hospitals was reviewed together and broken down by clinical speciality. The results show huge variations in clinical costs, infection rates, readmission rates, litigation payments and device and procedure selection. The review has highlighted the huge opportunity for hospitals to tackle these variations and aims to help local NHS chief executives make their hospitals saf ...

This #WeNurses discussion is Guest Hosted by Richard Clark @PtSafetyZoneMistakes are common place within healthcare with an estimated 1 in 10 patients suffering from an adverse event.Most of these (around 2/3rds) of errors are avoidable however understanding the causes are the biggest challenge to healthcare providers. What makes a nurse give the wrong medication to the wrong patient? Why are blood samples incorrectly labelled? It doesn’t matter how good you are, we are all prone to making elementary mistakes in the chaotic environment such as a hospital or clinical setting.The Patient Safety Zone is a three part care bundle designed to change the culture of practice and the way we communicate to our patients as well as our colleagues;1, In ...

Rapid advances in technology mean that there are now a wide range of digital health technologies available to us to improve patient care and outcomes, as well as making best use of healthcare resources. Diagnostics, point of care testing, remote consultation, telemedicine and telecare, digital therapeutics, electronic records, gamification, apps, wearables, augmented reality, connected communities and more. There are now a huge range of technologies available for us to improve health and healthcare, and more on the way. And yet the NHS is notoriously slow at adopting technology. This means that there are evidence-based technologies that have yet to be put into routine NHS use, let alone new products coming to market. How do we as AHPs help ...

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Our human rights are the basic rights and freedoms we have because we are human. They provide a set of minimum standards, outlined in law for how the government should treat us as individuals. Our human rights are protected through the Human Rights Act (HRA), which makes the rights written in the European Convention on Human Rights part of UK law.The HRA guarantees these minimum standards in two key ways. Firstly it places a duty on public officials (including health services) to uphold these standards by respecting our human rights in everything they do. Secondly human rights law provides a foundation for all other law, including health and social care law. Human rights will underpin many of the situations practitioners caring for people a ...

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So first one…what does it feel like preparing for a learning placement? You might be a student getting yourself ready for your very first time in practice or you could be a practice teacher awaiting your first student. Either way, practice learning is a significant part of the health and social care education experience and the first one is a breeding ground of nerves, excitement and anxieties. What are the hints, tips and hacks that make for a successful partnership between practice teacher and student? What can you do before, during and after your first placement experience to make it an effective learning opportunity? How do you best support learning on placement? How can you capitalise on your placement learning once you are back at uni ...