Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust - Lung patients benefit from daily monitoring

Keeping patients safe at home during the pandemic

There are a range of community health services, many of these are delivered by Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust.

To respond to the pandemic, LPT has changed the way it delivers some services. But they have worked successfully to give patients the care they need, while ensuring that they have maximised protection to patients and staff from possible sources of infection. Over the past few years, health and social care services have given a greater emphasis on helping people avoid going into hospital at all, or to getting home sooner if they do have to go into hospital. This meant we were in a good position to care for the very many older or

vulnerable patients who were advised to shield in the earlier stages of the pandemic. We have a Home First pathway which enables us to give patients who are most unwell, or who require a rapid response to help them with a health or care crisis, a more intensive period of care. We work alongside social care colleagues to provide a crisis response to prevent an admission to hospital, or reablement for patients coming out of hospital – getting them back to their optimum level of health as quickly as possible. These services are delivered by professionals including nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and healthcare support workers. Throughout the Covid period community nursing and therapy services have continued, though they have focussed on the patients most in need of care at home, and provided less clinic-based care. Our phlebotomy service has been doing a lot of extra work, taking blood samples from patients who previously would have gone to their GP practices but were unable to because they were shielding. Along with all our other staff, they have been using additional personal protective equipment (PPE) including masks to keep themselves and their patients safe. The PPE requirements have been taken very seriously, staff have been trained how to use the PPE safely and we have needed to organise our working day differently to account for the additional time required. Our community nursing teams provide a wide range of nursing care to patients in their own homes. One important part of their role is supporting patients to self care. That includes teaching patients how to give their own eye drops, or how to inject themselves with insulin, or sometimes, training another member of the family to do this for a patient, whilst making sure that there is somebody there to support them if they have any problems. Self care is really important and can help our patients regain an extra dimension of independence

(from the left) Sam, Nima, Tia and Suzy

while remaining safe. Tia, a healthcare assistant based in Market Harborough, said that a lot of the focus had been on hospitals, but a great many Covid-positive patients were cared for successfully in their own homes. She said in the early days of the national lockdown nursing staff were often the only visitors a patient would have because of restrictions around visiting people not in your household. Sam, a staff nurse from Leicester, added that the teams were prepared for every scenario, whether patients were Covid-positive or not. Our therapists (physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists) have not been doing all the visits that they might have done previously in the same way. Instead, they have focussed on patients who have needed more urgent and intensive support. One of the things that they have developed through this time is a much greater use of telephone calls and video conferencing to assess the condition of individual patients, and to give them advice and information about how best to manage or improve their condition. This has been appreciated by patients. One physiotherapy patient said: “They contacted me to offer support on the phone during the Covid 19 crisis. They didn’t forget about me.” Another added: “My care has been exemplary, particularly in view of the current pandemic.” Nima, a therapy lead based in Leicester, said: “We’re trying to keep some patients at home, and for others we’re trying to facilitate them to come out of hospital that little bit quicker.” Another important part of our role is supporting patients at the end of their lives. Most patients want to die surrounded by their family and friends – something that has been severely curtailed in hospitals due to Covid restrictions. Suzy is a staff nurse based in Hinckley. She said: “I’m especially proud of the way our team have taken on the end-of-life patients that have come home either from hospital or have been diagnosed at home. We facilitated their wish that to die at home rather than in hospital.” Tia added: “Just remember us as a team – we are out here tackling the virus, it’s not just in hospitals and we do like to help and we like to make a difference.” To hear more from the team, follow this link: https://youtu.be/dPxmTdfewOs .