We are proactively enhancing our nursing skills to meet the needs of the patients in a timely effective and efficient manner.
We have recently developed a triage tool suitable for a Type II (Monday to Friday) specialist eye casualty. This enables our nurses to triage correctly and offer timely care for our patients.
We work as part of a multidisciplinary team and have an excellent relationship with our medical colleagues who are all committed to and support skill enhancement for all the nurses.
All skill development is supported by competence assessment via self directed and guided learning.
We have developed a practitioner portfolio of competence for our registered nurses and an assistant practitioner portfolio for our non registered nurses. We have supported this development with written standards of care for all basic ophthalmic skills as defined by the RCN Ophthalmic Forum.
We work across the sites with our nurses rotating throughout to ensure the same standard of care is delivered to all patients across sites.
We effectively deliver nurse led care for pre-op, post-op and FFA patients. These services have been developed using evidence based practice where possible and developing the standard for nurse led FFA using a national audit of practice.
We have developed nursing patient group directions to support our work in clinics and A&E. We have actively supported one of our team to become a registered non-medical prescriber and complete the online course in glaucoma assessment, diagnosis and treatment.
We work together as a team and as part of the wider healthcare community that provide care for our patients in our local area.
We do not believe in standing still and are continually looking to improve in our nurses and our nursing service. We develop our nurses to be able to use the latest technology to ensure our patients receive the best possible care. Written standards of care are reviewed and updated in line with new developments and practice
We are committed to education and are proud to have achieved RCN accreditation for our short course in ophthalmic nursing skills.
We are totally committed to enhancing the skills of the whole team and provide a six week in-house health care assistants course. The course is supported by a portfolio of practice for this level of staff but remains consistent with the standards of ophthalmic care developed by the nursing team. This ensures all our staff deliver care to the best possible standard.
We were shortlisted as finalists in the Nursing Times National Awards 2008 for A&E with our ophthalmic triage tool.
We won the Trust Clinical Award for this development in 2008
We are currently auditing a patient education DVD which was scripted, filmed and directed by a member of our nursing team. The project was fully supported by the whole of the MDT.
