‘They needed something more after treatment’
Source: www.nursingtimes.net Author: Claire Reed Lesley Taylor wanted to examine the lack of support for patients at the end of treatment, so the decision was made to explore the impact of a wellbeing clinic on care, Claire Read reports. When the results of the study came back, they confirmed what Lesley Taylor and her colleagues had long suspected. The patients for whom they cared were getting good support for their actual medical issues, but their post-treatment needs weren’t always being identified or met. Ms Taylor is the Macmillan advanced oncology nurse specialist at NHS Tayside, as well as the head and neck cancer nurse specialist at the same organisation. It was on these patients which Ms Taylor’s study was focused. “We could look down into their mouths and throats and say there was no evidence of any cancer, and that was great, they appreciated that. But what we didn’t have time to do in that medically-led clinic was look at things like dry mouth, and swallow, and the emotional aspects and the social aspects that come alongside what are often life-changing diagnoses and treatments,” she remembers. “It became clear they needed something very much more at the end of treatment.” And so the decision was taken to instigate a nurse and allied health professional-led wellbeing clinic. The idea was to provide the sort of support that had been lacking; the holistic look at someone’s life in the immediate aftermath of the end of treatment. The team worked together to reshuffle [...]