Working together to improve Orkney’s Health and Wellbeing – Community Nursing

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This feature on our Community Nursing service is the second of our regular series of patient information updates to put the spotlight on clinical services at NHS Orkney. As an organisation, we want to share with you and be open and transparent about how we are addressing the challenges we face in supporting you. The Community Nursing service in Orkney is under pressure, and we need your assistance to help us meet your needs and to support you to take responsibility for your own health and wellbeing.

We start this feature by asking for your support to make the best use of our service.  We need to ask you, our patients to only use the service if you are housebound. We understand that you may need to access the service during a period of illness or following surgery or a procedure, however, once you have recovered enough to go out and about you will be asked to attend a practice nurse appointment rather than rely on our Community Nursing service. If you normally attend any appointments independently or with assistance, you will be asked to attend another service such as your GP surgery. As we review our patient visit list this ask will also include patients who are currently seen by the service that can go out and attend other services for care.

Our Community Nursing Team provides highly skilled nursing care and advice seven days a week, 365 days a year to patients within their own homes, care homes and sheltered accommodation settings. We can also support carers and families to enable patients to be cared for at home. In September, there were 1,631 clinical contacts made across mainland Orkney. This equates on average to 55 visits a day between seven staff members on each shift.

For a number of reasons visits can be missed. Reasons can include, patients attending appointments with other health professionals out with your home or attending recreational appointments such as the hairdresser. These missed visits all have a direct impact on our service. If a visit is missed, we have a duty to ensure your safety. This can significantly increase our workload and has the potential to delay other patients care. During September, in total there were 36 missed visits.  

As with many NHS services, Community Nursing is in a challenging position both locally and nationally across Scotland. We know that there are many changes across services that may lead to a delay in you accessing care, however, our Community Nursing service is often used as a temporary ‘buffer’ to provide care whilst awaiting appointments for other services. Referrals can be made by healthcare professionals including GPs, nurses, allied health professionals, social services, care at home, care home providers and self-referrals. We would like to be clear that Community Nursing is not an emergency service and therefore, all referrals will be triaged to ensure that our Community Nursing service is the most appropriate team to meet your care needs, another service may be asked to provide your care.

What we can do to help at NHS Orkney

  • Treat you as an individual and be a partner in your care
  • We are working hard to ensure we have sufficient nursing and support staff to deliver timely, patient-centred care. We have an active recruitment process in place and locum support in place in the meantime to plug some of our current gaps  
  • We are committed to ensuring the service is further developed, and this includes exploring other options of delivering care

What we need you to do to help

  • Please take responsibility for your own health and wellbeing by informing our team if there have been any changes to your health since your last visit
  • If you have nursing care notes, please ensure these are available for the team to complete at each visit
  • If, once in better health, you are asked to attend your GP Practice instead of continuing to receive Community Nurse visits, please accept this request for the sake of future patients
  • Please ensure there is safe access to your home and that pets are kept under control
  • You refrain from smoking for a minimum of one hour before our visit
  • Treat our staff with the respect and dignity they deserve. The teams are working extremely hard and go to extraordinary lengths to support your health and wellbeing. NHS Orkney has a zero-tolerance policy of any abuse directed at our staff who are doing the best possible job, often in difficult circumstances. We have the right to refuse treatment where abuse is unacceptable, as unfortunately experienced on occasion by some of our staff

Our Community Nursing Team provides a vital service and is appreciated by so many. Let’s all do what we can to help them this winter.