As a shared governance council we identified that our cardiac surgery patients needing maxilla-facial clearance were spending all day over at our other hospital campus, Queens Medical Centre, with a registered nurse escort.
This was very time consuming for patients and nurses, costly and drained registered nurse resource from a ward area.
We started to look at how we could make this part of the patient journey more efficient. We firstly assessed whether a registered nurse escort was needed and confirmed that our patients did need a RN escort.
During this assessment process we established better links with one of the dental nurses in the maxilla-facial department. She started attending our meetings and helped us to devise a checklist for the doctors to make the referral process easier for us and them. She also suggested that it would make a difference if we enquired whether there was a working dental x-ray machine at Nottingham City Hospital (NCH).
We established that there was a brand new machine at NCH that was ready for use.
One of the maxillo-facial radiologists came over to NCH and adjusted some of the machine settings to improve the quality of the images.
Through the maxillo-facial links made during the project, patients from tertiary centres and other CCG’s now aim to have their clearance before transfer to us, as they would see the same Orthodontist at each centre.
We also experienced major problems with transport issues, again with patients from the tertiary centres and other CCG’s. They needed their own transport provision due to them being from out of area.
This has currently been overcome with the use of Ambicorp to transfer our patients over to QMC, however we are still working on the return journey as we continue to experience some problems and patients can be delayed.
The sharing of this project at leadership council has also benefited other areas such as Oncology in regards to use of the x-ray machine. For further information please contact: Caroline Sheppard (Cardiology Matron) – [email protected]