Caring for patients at home during the pandemic NHS care isn’t just about big city hospitals and GP surgeries. There are a range of community health services, many of these are delivered by Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust (LPT). To respond to the pandemic, we at LPT have changed the way we deliver some services. But we have worked successfully to give patients the care they need, while ensuring that we 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 fewer clinic-based appointments. 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, while 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 while remaining safe.
This photo was taken before pandemic restrictions were in place 12
We have developed a number of new services specifically to address the needs of the pandemic. For a number of our heart and lung patients, we developed a service
