Nursing in the community podcast

In this webinar, Prof Andy Brooks, the new clinical chair of NAPC, and Steph Lawrence, Chief Executive of the Queen’s Institute of Community Nursing (QICN), discussed the evolving role and challenges of community nursing. They emphasised the need for greater visibility, support, and integration within neighborhood care models. They highlighted both innovative practices and significant challenges such as workforce shortages, increasing complexity, and the importance of supporting nurses in high-need areas, while also stressing the value of self-care and advocacy for the profession.

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Transcript

Andy

Welcome to NAPC webinar. My name’s Andy Brooks. I’m really pleased today to have Steph Lawrence join me for my very first webinar. Steph’s a nurse by background and has a wide range of experience in frontline care and executive positions and has been awarded an MBE for all the stuff that she’s done.

Steph

Thanks, Andy, and thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here. So as Andy said, my name is Steph. I’m currently the Chief Executive of the Queen’s Institute of Community Nursing. I’m fairly new in post, so I took up this position on the 1st of July this year, having previously been for the previous six months the Deputy Chief Executive. I’m a nurse by background, been a nurse for 38 years, most recently a district nurse, and most recently until I retired from the NHS last year, I was the Chief Nurse at Leeds Community Healthcare.

Andy

I’m not quite sure how we’re going to get 38 years of experience into our remaining 26 minutes, but we’ll try. We’re not going to be short of stuff to talk about given that experience. You mentioned before about the past and how sort of community nursing and district nursing were kind of worked hand in glove with general practice and general practice nursing. Thinking about the future, what’s your kind of view on what the future of nursing might look like given the kind of focus on neighbourhood and community setting.

Steph

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s an exciting time for us working out in the community outside of hospitals, if you want to use that term. I don’t particularly like that term, but I guess that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? I think it’s a good time for us to put our head above the parapet and talk about what we do. I don’t think there’s been enough focus on what happens outside of hospitals, including in primary care, including in district nursing, across all the specialisms in community nursing, of which we recognise nine in the QICN.

So we’ve got nine specialist practice fields of nursing. And then in addition to that, we’ve got the public health nursing qualifications such as health visitor, school nurse, occupational health nurse. So I think this is our time. I think we have to use our voices. One of the things we’re really trying to do here at the ICN is encourage our Queen’s nurses and other nurses that are part of our networks and our organisational memberships to really use their voice and to lobby their local politicians, but also national lobbying as well.

Andy

Yeah, it’s interesting, as you said, you mentioned the kind of nine kind of areas that you look after and things that are just sort of hidden. It’s sort of invisible, isn’t it really? And yet the amount of activity and stuff and care that happens in that domain, broadly in the community, but I guess particularly nursing is interesting. And I loved your point about the kind of unmet need or what safety issues are there, people that get put off, as you say, or need that just can’t be met.

So I think that’s really interesting challenge, isn’t it, more broadly, probably within the community sector about that. I definitely would support that in terms of maybe something we could think about how we raise that kind of game. And you mentioned as well about that kind of voice. I was wondering what you’re kind of hearing or what you’re seeing in terms of some of the different innovative care models that might be out there that people are already doing locally that might, you know, we could learn about and therefore other areas might, sort of stuff going on at the moment?

Steph

Yeah, lots of really exciting things, actually. I’ve seen all sorts recently. So one of the things I’ve done as I’ve first come into role is gone out and about a little bit to try and see what’s going on across the country. Obviously, from my previous role in Leeds, I knew what was going on in Leeds and a little bit about West Yorkshire, but I didn’t really know what was going on in the rest of the country. So I’ve been on a bit of a grand tour of the country. I’ve just told you earlier, Andy, I’m going to Cornwall later this week, which I’m really looking forward to.

But yeah, I think there’s some really innovative ways of working happening. I think thinking about how we’re doing things differently. I think if I just take district nursing as an example, I think we, you know, district nursing has generally been commissioned to look after people in their own homes because people can’t get out of their own homes. But actually, in my experience, there’s lots of people we go into that with a little bit of a little bit of creativity could potentially get out of their own homes. And there’s lots of benefit to that because being at home, lonely, isolated, brings its own challenges. Isolation can be as dangerous as multiple long term conditions. So I think I’ve seen areas where they’re bringing people into clinics rather than seeing everybody at home.

And actually as part of that, I’ve then been able to introduce things like bringing in local authority into those settings, but also the third sector, which I think we’ve got to remember in these neighbourhood models. We can’t do this alone. And as health professionals, whether that be yourself, Andy as a doctor, myself as a nurse, we’ve got a certain set of skills but we are not the ones skilled in some of those areas of making sure that people get what they need in the community. I think the third sector can do a lot of help with that.

So I’ve seen areas where that’s been used, where we’re using, instead of having things in clinical settings, we’re holding them in perhaps church hall or maybe in, in fact, I’ve seen things in a town hall where we’re holding wound clinics, for example, in town halls where people can come together.

But we bring the third sector into that and then might do a session on what the local luncheon club can offer, for example, and things like that. So I think that’s really great. I think I’ve also seen more integrated working across the different fields of community practice, which I think is great. So whilst we all have, well, those nine fields of practice are all unique in their own right, there is crossover. So if you took what a general practice nurse does versus a district nurse, there is some crossover in that. So if we took wound care as an example, So how could we work better together to make sure that we’re not duplicating each other’s work, making sure the right person’s doing the right things and the person, the patient is getting the right care?

Andy

Yeah, no, thank you. To finish off, Steph, just thinking about, you’ve, I think you mentioned the beginning of 38 years, district nurse, a practitioner, and all the stuff that you’ve done. I was wondering if you could give yourself a bit of advice looking back for whichever point that you, stuff that you know now about leadership or management and so on. What would be your kind of advice to yourself?

Steph

Yeah, so I had a little thing about this. I’ve got two things, Andy, if that’s okay. So the first and most important one is to make sure that we look after ourselves. So there’s been plenty of times in my career when I haven’t really done that as well as I could and should have done. And I don’t just mean from a physical health perspective, I also mean from a mental health perspective as well.

So I think looking after ourselves, because if we don’t do that, nobody else will do it. So whatever that thing is that you like doing that helps you de-stress at the end of the day, whether that’s, I don’t know, it could be a walk in the park, it could be knitting, reading a book, whatever it might be, make sure you make time for that, because I think that is critically, critically important.

And my second thing would be, always be true to yourself. So don’t, whatever you hear, whatever you see, you’ve got to stay strong and think about the reason you came into the job in the 1st place and believe in that and that strength of your own values and your own ethics, I think are critically important because it is a tough world out there sometimes, but being true to yourself will never take you off the path that you need to be on. So those would be my two bits of advice, I think, Andy.

Andy

Thank you everybody for joining us on the web and I hope that’s been interesting. Please do let me know about what you thought of today and about other sessions. And thanks again to Steph for giving up your time. It’s been really great chatting to you.

Steph

Thank you. A pleasure.