A specialist nursing team with Swindon-based social enterprise SEQOL has won the country’s top award for community nurses.
The deep vein community nurse specialist team were presented with the RCNi Community Nursing Award at a recent ceremony in London.
The RCNi is the publishing arm of the Royal College of Nursing, the largest professional union for nursing with more than 430,000 members, which influences policy and practice for the benefit of nursing staff and their patients.
The team, led by nurse specialist Jo Boyd, is the first in which nurses working in the community use ultrasound to confirm or exclude deep vein thrombosis (DVT).
Before Jo made her pioneering suggestions to develop the service, almost all patients with a suspected DVT would be put on anticoagulants and had to wait for a hospital-based scan for diagnosis.
In 2014, a total of 1,476 patients received an average of three unnecessary doses of anticoagulants while waiting to be screened.
Jo said: “The DVT team were concerned about the wait for ultrasound diagnosis.
“The symptoms of a DVT often mimic other conditions so an ultrasound scan is sometimes the only safe way to exclude the condition. Patients needed an injection of anticoagulants daily until they had a scan. This delay in diagnosis caused people to feel uncertainty and concern.”
Jo saw an opportunity to speed up the diagnosis by providing a scanning service based in the community.
She took the suggestion to the SEQOL executive team, which supported it. It has been an incredible success with patients being assessed, scanned and diagnosed at the SEQOL specialist treatment centre at Swindon’s Moredon Medical Centre site on the same day.
Treatment and review is also carried out at the centre. Jo has also become the first nurse in the country to be trained as a DVT sonographer and is now passing on the skills to the members of her team.
Before SEQOL introduced the new way of working, only 20% of patients received a scan within 24 hours and only 4% at initial consultation. The figures are now 97% and 94% respectively, and written feedback from patients is consistently positive.
Jo and her colleague Lucy Reynolds accepted the award at the ceremony at Westminster Park Plaza Hotel.
Jo said: “We were absolutely thrilled to win, although we were surprised because there were so many strong candidates also up for the award. It’s a fantastic accolade for the entire DVT team, and we’re very proud to have had such an impact on patient care, and to have had it recognised on a national platform.
“I’m very grateful to SEQOL for giving us the space and encouragement to be able to push forward the boundaries of nursing and for continuing to have faith in us.”
SEQOL chief executive Heather Mitchell added: “This is a fantastic accolade that is well deserved by our deep vein community nurse specialist team.
“As shareholders of SEQOL, our colleagues are encouraged and empowered to take innovative approaches to solving problems, and this is a superb example of how that can lead to changes that have considerable positive impact both on patients’ wellbeing and on the cost of providing care.”
The RCNi Community Nursing Award is open to NHS or independent sector nurses who work in community settings, such as health centres, GP surgeries, care homes, schools or patients’ homes. It is supported by Primary Health Care and sponsored by Superdrug.
Pictured, from left: Michael Henry of sponsors Superdrug, Jo Boyd and Lucy Reynolds of SEQOL and awards host, comedian Lucy Porter
