Community nurses have been introduced to an ambulance control room to link-up services and improve response times this winter.
The control room at Lincolnshire Community Health Services NHS Trust has introduced senior community nurses into the team, to support ambulance staff with prioritising responses and organising alternative care in the community.
The pilot scheme, which was introduced four weeks ago, has seen up to 20 fewer ambulances being dispatched per day, with some patient’s receiving community support instead.
Rebecca Neno is deputy director of system delivery at Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) and a former district nurse, she told Nursing in Practice that some people call 999 as a ‘way into’ community services that they don’t know how to access.
She said ‘linking up’ services had seen more patients get the right support sooner.
‘Our ambulance service is there for that life and limb service. They are trained in a totally different way to the nursing staff who are skilled in avoiding attendance, avoiding admission and also pulling people back from the acute as quickly as possible,’ Ms Neno explained.
Calls into the control room are prioritised on a one to three scale, with category four cases being the least severe and category one being the most.
Under the new system, category three and four calls will typically be flagged to the community nursing team who cover the lower-severity cases including catheter issues, infections, and falls without injury.
Waiting times for category three calls can be up to 18 hours, so patients can be seen much quicker when their care is redeployed to a community nursing team, community response service, or urgent treatment centre instead.
Natalie Favill is a registered nurse and trainee clinical practitioner who currently works at the control centre. She previously worked as a nurse practitioner in a GP surgery.
‘It’s really interesting to see how the ambulance service works, because we’re two separate organisations and although we’ve worked together in other ways, we’re not usually in the same room,’ Ms Favill told Nursing in Practice.
She said working between services has increased networking opportunities and built relationships across teams, which she sees as an ‘important part’ of advanced practice.
‘It makes better relationships, better networks and better outcomes for the patient so we can direct them to the best care, which may not be an ambulance,’ she added.
Yesterday, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warned extreme winter pressures and a flu ‘tidal wave’ were exposing a ‘cavernous gap’ between low numbers of nurses and rising demands from patients.
This came as latest NHS England data showed a surge in infections has led to a 70% increase in hospital flu cases in just seven days.
Last week, the union warned that there was ‘barely a spare bed’ left in NHS hospitals following a lack of capacity in social care.
