Development and evaluation of a community respiratory physiotherapy service for children with severe neurodisability.

Children with severe disability often have difficulties with secretion clearance leading to recurrent lower respiratory tract infections and prolonged hospital admissions. A community respiratory physiotherapy service was developed for this client group, including a rapid response for acute respiratory illness, and an evaluation was undertaken, comparing admissions and bed-days in hospital for respiratory tract infections, emergency admissions to hospital for any cause, and admission costs for each child for the 12 months before to the 12 months with the service. Thirty-four children aged 1 to 19 years (median 5) were eligible for the "before and after" evaluation at 28 months; most had severe cerebral palsy 22 (65%), and there were also eight (23%) children with neurodegenerative and four (12%) with neuromuscular conditions. Admissions for respiratory tract infection fell from 43 to 25 (p<0.05), respiratory admission bed-days fell from 383 to 236 (p<0.01), total non-elective admissions fell from 64 to 40 (p<0.01), with admission cost savings of GBP 78,155 (52%) per annum. This small study suggests that a community respiratory physiotherapy service can reduce hospital admissions and bed days for disabled children. The admissions cost savings have enabled the service to "pay for itself".

Reflections on the experience of counseling supervision by a team of genetic counselors from the UK.

Despite it being generally acknowledged that counseling supervision is a vital part of the work for experienced genetic counselors and not just students, not all practising genetic counselors in the United Kingdom and Eire have access to this yet. This case study documents the supervision experience of our team of genetic counselors from Cambridge in the U.K. We document our retrospective thoughts on working practice before supervision was available in our department. We also give an overview of the individual and collective views of having one-to-one supervision only and then one year later, the impact of adding group supervision. Our 'supervision journey' is recorded using a practitioner-centred approach with a mixed method of data collection. Two focus group discussions and two written questionnaires were used, at different time points to gather attitudes. This paper captures experiences as our practice of supervision has evolved. This work is relevant to practising genetic counselors around the world who either do not yet have access to supervision, are planning its implementation or else are adding different types of supervision to their practice.