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.
This photo was taken before pandemic restrictions were in place 12
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
