Nurses improve quality standards

Members of Pennine Care’s new nurses’ forum pictured with Michael McCourt, Director of Operations and Nursing

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust has established a nurses’ forum to lead on improving nursing and care standards across the Trust.

Pennine Care employs hundreds of nurses working in a range of community and mental health services, including district nursing, children’s nursing, health visiting, community psychiatric nursing and palliative care.

Led by nurses themselves, the forum is focussed on developing consistent standards of high quality care, improving professional development and enforcing accountability. It will also look at establishing a network where nurses can share best practice, meet on a regular basis and celebrate excellence.

“At some point in our lives, every person will have contact with a nurse as a child, an adult, in old age or at the end of life,” said Michael McCourt, Director of Nursing and Operations for Pennine Care.

“People are now living longer, often with a number of health needs, which makes patient care more complex than ever. Whilst our nursing teams already do great work, we want to ensure we continually strive to drive up standards of nursing care and drive out variations.

“By bringing our community and mental health nurses together, we will be in a strong position to respond to the challenge of delivering care in a time of growing demands. We will also focus on delivering better nursing care in the community, so we can support people at home and prevent them from having to go to hospital for treatment.”
Pennine Care has also been selected to become an early-adopter site for the Government’s Nursing and Care Quality Forum, launched last week, which aims to improve the quality of nursing care across all care settings.

Mr McCourt added: “Nursing has faced considerable criticism over the last few years, which doesn’t reflect the fantastic work the majority of nurses do. We want to restore the justifiable pride in the profession – both for our clinicians and patients.”