Keep talking – we’re listening

Don’t you just love it when plans start to work?

A year ago, an innocent little conversation started on Haemnet. Sarah asked whether anyone had any experience of setting up Link Nurse groups for bleeding disorders in DGHs. She thought “it would be a useful way of sharing information and knowledge with colleagues from different specialties and ensuring that at least one or two staff from other areas have an awareness of bleeding disorders.”

Although this seemed like a beneficial idea, the ensuing conversation with Helen, Claire and others touched on some of the likely challenges.

Kate and I found some money and invited Claire, Helen, Sarah and Jemma to meet with us in Birmingham. We booked a meeting room, arranged lunch and prepared some slides. Very small scale – not the usual industry funded sort of thing but we had a good discussion and came away with some good ideas, one being to do a survey (thank you everyone who responded). The result, as Helen and Jemma (below) presented at HNA in Oxford, could be summed up as “sensible idea, will help in some places but not everywhere.”

That work has now been accepted for publication in Haemophilia, the first time that some of our nurses will have been published.

Our challenge is now to develop the Link Nurse training pack. For this, we’ll take a bottom-up approach (crowd sourcing, if you will) to make sure it really is the work of Claire, Helen, Sarah, Jemma and the other nurses who have (been) volunteered to help.

The end product might be less glossy than the brochures and slide sets you usually get from industry-funded agencies (though Haemnet can call on a crack team of designers and developers). But it will be practically useful and truly authored by practising nurses.

All of which is really a way of saying, if you have an idea for something that you believe will benefit patient care or make the lives of healthcare professionals easier (not an unworthy aim) then talk about it on Haemnet. Chances are someone else has had a similar thought and might want to work with you on it.

Being at the sharp end of patient care, nurses are often best placed to institute the small changes in practice that can have a major impact on patient care. We don’t have unlimited funding but where we can help we will.

 

Mike Holland founded Haemnet and SixVibe. He is a medical writer, editor and event organiser – find him at Google+ or Driftwood.