Introducing employment passports for nurses and other healthcare workers

Hospital passports have been used for a number of years for certain patient groups and are designed to give hospital staff helpful information about patients who have frequent admissions to hospital....

Urgent and emergency care: patient safety and quality issues

There seems to be no shortage of reports looking at urgent and emergency care provision and how to make good, how to re-cast service provision in the face of demand on resources. The problems facing...

Increased maximum sentences for assaulting nurses

‘An assault on any individual or citizen in our society is a terrible thing, but an assault on an emergency worker is an assault on us all. These people are our constituted representatives. They...

On a journey to excellence

Housing and disabled people

Addressing a real concern

Assessing and managing patients with leg ulceration and oedema

Arterial ulcers develop as a consequence of reduced arterial blood flow to the leg, the main cause of which is peripheral arterial disease (PAD). PAD affects up to 20% of the population aged 60 years...

Fabricated or induced illness in a child

The first population-wide estimates were made by McClure et al (1996) by collating 128 reports of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, non-accidental poisoning and non-accidental suffocation sent to the...

Should known allergy status be included as a medication administration ‘right’?

A 3-year-old child was brought into the emergency department (ED) of a hospital in the Middle East by his parents. The father informed the ED nursing staff that the young child had been unwell with a...

Using simulated patients as a learning strategy to support undergraduate nurses to develop patient-teaching skills

Patient education is part of nursing practice (NMC, 2018b), and integral to person-centred care (World Health Organization (WHO), 2011). Some authors (Lin and Wang, 2017; Richard et al, 2018) have...

Sustaining the commitment to patient safety huddles: insights from eight acute hospital ward teams

Since June 2013, eight acute wards in one UK hospital have pioneered the use of PSHs. The PSH is seen as:.

Setting up an arthroplasty care practitioner-led virtual clinic for follow-up of orthopaedic patients

In the UK, the professional orthopaedic community has been supporting the development of advanced practitioners involved in the care of patients with a joint replacement and guidelines for follow-up...

Blood donation: nurse roles and responsibilities

Because the blood components collected are manufactured into therapeutic transfusions for patients, under UK law, NHSBT has to comply with the Blood Safety and Quality Regulations..

Links between mental and heart health

Unfortunately, rates of depression and anxiety have been reported to be 20–30% after a cardiac event, and rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide are also elevated (Jackson et al, 2018a)....

From staff nurse to nurse consultant: Survival Guide part 6: Surviving critical incidents