Short-term changes to the Redbridge District Nursing service

We are getting in touch to update you about some important short-term changes to the Redbridge District Nurse service. As you may be aware, the district nursing teams continue to face significant challenges with staffing and volume of referrals. To meet these increasingly challenging demands the decision has been taken to put the teams into business continuity. This will allow us to deliver our core responsibility of managing the most critical patients in the community, safely. It is intended that these changes will be in place for no longer than 8 weeks.

Whilst in business continuity we will continue to see those on our current caseloads, and we will be maintaining our measures to ensure we are discharging in a timely fashion. We will be limited in our capacity to take on new referrals during this time, however, and can only accept patients who fit into the following: 

• Palliative Syringe drivers/unstable
• Wound Care Housebound
• Insulin Housebound
• Anticoagulant injections Housebound

This will reduce our weekly referrals to a level that we can manage on our staffing.

This disruption will be in place for the shortest amount time possible. I want to reassure you that this is a short-term decision, and we have no intention of continuing in this fashion in the longer term. We are committed to communicating openly and honestly with partners throughout this process. The decision will be reviewed weekly, and we will update partners regularly about the service and progress against our improvement plans. Place based partnership leads have been notified of the decision and will be kept up to date with the decision-making process. 

We are taking active steps to resolve the situation and improve our resilience to these challenges. The service continues to utilise bank and agency nurses to support delivery, and we plan to bring in more bank staff over the coming weeks to take on more specific tasks. It will take time to recruit and train these staff members, but we hope that once in place it will improve our capacity to meet rising demand. Once we are confident in our capacity to meet demand, we will take the decision to end the period of business continuity. 

We appreciate your understanding, patience, and willingness to work with us during this time.