Deprescribing in end-of-life care

Awareness of the anatomical changes that occur during the end stages of life is fundamental to support the rationale for stopping medications (Mangoni and Jackson, 2003). When a disease progresses,...

Managing sickness absence and declared disabilities in a district nursing team

‘Organisations that work with their staff to provide healthy and safe work combined with a caring environment perform better, and, importantly, by promoting the health of their workers rather than...

Delivering chemotherapy at home: how much do we know?

Traditionally, home chemotherapy has entailed the delivery of the treatment under supervision by a specialised nurse. With the advent of ambulatory devices, this term has evolved to include ambulatory...

Social frailty: the importance of social and environmental factors in predicting frailty in older adults

The Canadian Study of Health and Ageing (CSHA) collected data from 10 263 people aged 65 years or over, sampled from 36 different communities across Canada. The subjects represented the...

Improving patient outcomes with neighbourhood care: the Coldstream experience

Buurtzorg founder Jos de Blok's presentation at the 2016 Queen's Nursing Institute Scotland (QNIS) conference prompted the district nursing team in Coldstream to consider how it could apply...

Taking an active approach to medicines management

Despite the best efforts of medicines management to identify both the areas of prescribing that yield low clinical value and the potential cost savings of using cheaper clinically equivalent...

Celecoxib for osteoarthritis

The objectives of this Cochrane review were to assess the benefits and harms of using celecoxib in osteoarthritis. The benefits and harms considered included pain function, quality of life,...

Death as the final phase of development

Ageism in nursing

It is not easy to form a wholly dependable picture of staffing levels in healthcare. Much depends on the purpose for which the statistics are gathered. One such purpose is to gain an impression of how...

Depression, antidepressants and withdrawal in the community

The review (PHE, 2019) was a response to a call from the minister for public health and primary care in 2017 for PHE to identify the scale, distribution and causes of prescription drug dependence, as...

Optimising medication

‘Community nurses can contribute to medication safety by helping to monitor high-risk medications and highlighting concerns regarding non-adherence to the relevant treatment guidelines.‘.

Celebrating the contribution of foreign staff in the NHS

Peristomal skin care considerations for community nurses

There are three main types of output stoma that the community nurse is likely to see. These are the colostomy, ileostomy and urostomy. A colostomy will usually pass formed faeces and flatus between...

Getting the best out of staff in a district nursing team: nurturing resilience

Efficiency savings are a powerful driver to stretch teams as much as possible to obtain maximum productivity, and cost-improvement programmes (CIPs) that identify schemes to increase efficiency or...

Benefits of nurse-led continence prescription services for effective stock management and streamlined prescribing

Early assessment by a qualified and appropriately trained professional allows a patient-centred and cost-effective care pathway to be followed, leading to better outcomes (APPG, 2011). In clinical...