Smoking cessation in 2019

Encouragingly, smokers in Great Britain are on the decline, as an increasing number of people are attempting and succeeding at quitting (Office for National Statistics, 2018). Nonetheless, the overall...

Improving service delivery

‘It is not simply the innovation and its implementation but also the context and interaction between these elements which influence success.’ .

Reflections on cold weather and older age

Compassionate leadership in district nursing: a case study of a complex wound

While we might intuitively know what ‘leadership’ looks like, definitions are often coloured by the perspective of the individual and the context in which ‘leadership’ is being defined, with the...

Managing deterioration in older adults in care homes: a quality improvement project to introduce an early warning tool

The measures for evaluating processes and impact are presented in Table 2. These included outcome, process and balancing measures..

Administering intravenous therapy in patients' homes

Nurses should always observe hand hygiene before performing any aseptic technique (NICE, 2014), and home IV therapy must always be an aseptic technique. Hands should be washed with soap and warm water...

Understanding incontinence in the older person in community settings

The causes of incontinence in the older population are usually multifactorial (Table 1) and consequently require a number of different interventions for treatment. There are significant age-related...

Professional, structural and organisational interventions in primary care for reducing medication errors

The objective of the Cochrane review by Khalil et al (2017) was to assess the effectiveness of structural, organisational and professional interventions to reduce preventable medication errors...

Follow-up visits to older patients after a hospital stay: nurses' perspectives

Two categories emerged that described nurses' experiences of immediate follow-up visits to older patients with multimorbidity who had been discharged from hospital: Relieving anxiety at home and...

Using the PEAS technique to communicate in palliative care

Recent noteworthy cases related to employment law

The first case the authors discuss is United First Partners Research v Carreras, in which the Court of Appeal held that an employer's expectation and ‘long hours culture’ could amount to a provision,...

How will a no-deal Brexit impact medicines in the UK?

According to the Minister of State for Health and Social Care, Stephen Hammond, the storage for medicine stockpiles in the event that the UK withdraws from the EU on 29 March 2019 without an agreement...