18 September 2022
Our latest fundraising appeal highlighted our urgent need for more specialist community nurses, and the innovative solution our nursing team came up with: to recruit and train nurses from other parts of the healthcare system to join our community team.
With your support that training is happening. A six-week community nursing programme, piloted in 2021, is in place as part of our clinical development offering.
Thanks to your generosity, nine nurses have so far completed it. They’ve come from surgical, oncology, district nursing and aged care disciplines, with one nurse recruited from the United Kingdom.
Community Nurse Team Leader Jarna Standen says the programme has been essential in planning for how we manage the current national shortage of nurses.
“With more skilled nurses on the road we are reaching more people, sooner,” she continues. “And through Covid, continuing to recruit these nurses and invest early in their development has
been essential in ensuring we are able to continue delivering the service.”
Nurse Claudia Samson, who joined the team and underwent the training in February after 10 years of working as an oncology nurse says, “I’ve never had a job before where you have so much support and such a comprehensive programme to ease you in. “It gave me confidence in my new role, and that support continues.”
The biggest learning for Claudia was that specialist palliative community nursing takes a much more holistic approach to patient care. “The conversations and the planning are different; you’re working with multi-disciplinary teams; pain management is more specialised and you look at psychological suffering too.
“You take the time to sit down with patients and talk about how they feel, their fears. You really build that rapport and that’s very special.”
Click here to donate to Harbour Hospice and enable us to send more nurses into people's homes.
