ABSTRACT
BackgroundThe ability to deliver high quality compassionate end of life care depends on recruiting and retaining high quality staff. Post COVID-19, organisations including hospices acknowledge significant national challenges in recruiting clinical staff with appropriate palliative care experience to meet increasingly complex needs. Innovative ways of succession planning are essential. We present an innovative project whereby aspiring Nurse Consultants are recruited to join an educational programme, incorporating the five pillars of advanced practice, underpinned by robust capabilities. We invite aspiring nurse consultants from other palliative care organisations across the UK to join the programme to benefit from shared learning and development. It encourages co-creation of learning opportunities with the aspiring Nurse Consultants.AimsIn our presentation we will explore the advantages/challenges of developing a contemporary programme of education and support for aspiring Nurse Consultants, as a prototype to develop consultant nurses of the future who can fill the requirement for consultant level input to hospice and broader palliative care workforces. The paper considers how this programme might be upscaled.ApproachAn initial cohort of three aspiring Nurse Consultants at St Christopher’s will be joined by further candidates to start a formal programme of learning, augmented by in-role support and reflection. All attend to clinical practice, service development, leadership, research and QI. The detail of the approach reflects seminal work by Manley, Taylor and Canadian capabilities related to the delivery of palliative care.ResultsWe will report on progress related to recruitment, the detail of the programme, development of the community of practice to which all participants will join and any learning along the way. Also, our insights regarding the value of such a course to support the increasing need for high quality end of life care as detailed in the Long-Term Plan and the Health and Social Care White Paper.
ABSTRACT
Continuing professional development for non-medical prescribers is recognised as being pivotal in maintaining up-to-date knowledge and skills influencing prescribing competence (Weglicki, et al., 2015). In palliative and end-of-life care, pharmacology and prescribing are rapidly changing and require regular CPD in order to keep up-to-date with the latest developments. Non-medical prescribing is a comparatively new innovation to nursing practice, and within the hospice setting. Therefore, nurse prescribers need mentorship from experienced prescribers, as well as the encouragement from nurse leaders to be confident prescribers themselves and enhance patient care (Wilson, et al.,2014).At St Christopher’s, we have encouraged our specialist nurses to undertake academic training to become independent nurse prescribers, and have seen practice flourish. A recent audit of anticipatory prescribing demonstrated the value of nurse prescribers in hospice care, in that 55% of all anticipatory prescribing was undertaken by nurse independent prescribers. This highlights the pressing need for continuing professional development.Until 2020, St Christopher’s supported our own nurses to attend a national study day to provide pharmacology and prescribing updates, but with the assault of COVID-19, we needed to think differently about how to deliver this. In doing so, we developed a monthly online community of practice which has grown in popularity. Joining this we have over 100 nurses working in palliative and end-of -life care who are non-medical prescribers. Once a month, using video conferencing technology, members of the community join us from all the four nations of the UK, to learn together, share knowledge and access the expertise of invited speakers.This presentation will outline the significant role of nurse prescribers within the hospice setting, and highlight the need to ensure the availability of CPD. In doing so, we will highlight one such approach to providing CPD, along with raising the national profile of this important work.