The
North London Cancer Network is hosting two
identical"issues
and solutions" workshops in July. These will generate ideas
to improve the integration and provision of care for neuro-oncology patients
following treatment in hospital.
This
national workshop will enable specialist neuro-oncology
centres
to meet
the NICE IOG guidelines on Brain/CNS in a timely fashion. (ie: no last minute
bolt-on's).
The
events will be held in Central London (location
to be confirmed) on:
July
23rd and July 29th from 10:00 to 16:00
Please
confirm your interest to attend and preferred
date as soon as possible by return of email
to:
Although
aimed at Brain/CNS services initially, the implications and solutions could and
should also benefit other neurological conditions support. Thus we invite anyone
with experience that they believe will help us to
register.We want
this event to be free to attendees and we are looking into sponsorship
opportunities. Any advice, help, etc towards achieving this will be
appreciated.
Welcome to the Neuro-oncology Supportive Care Project
Introduction
During the autumn of 2007 the North London Cancer Network was involved in a period of improvement work with cancer services at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. This work led to a number of 'spinoff' conversations with NHNN staff and outside agencies, including Katie Sheen, Chief Exec of SDBTT/Astrofund. What became immediately clear is a true problem in how neuro-oncology patients get access to timely care once they have completed treatment in the acute setting. Since October 2007, a core group comprising professionals from primary care, acute care and the voluntary sector have met every two months to discuss the issues and plan activities to investigate the known issues further.
In summer 2008, we will be holding two Issues awareness/ Ideas & Solutions generation workshops to discover what could be possible in the current climate of continuing care. These events require registration and we cordially invite professionals, carers and patients to join us on these discovery and design exercises.
Background
Once a patient has completed their treatment in acute care, the process of preparing the patient towards their eventual discharge occurs. This can be affected by where they will be repatriated, whether they have ongoing or newly developed cognitive impairment and what their care needs are.
The kind of questions that need resolving include:
What happens to inpatients after treatment?
The discharge process?
The psychological gap in care?
Is enough being achieved in the community?
Skills and professional expertise?
These questions and the processes/information that currently support them are very localised and developing a picture of local services to enable the discharge process requires integrating communications between professionals who may not have regular contact.
What we would like in these workshops is to get an understanding of what are the agenda's out there that neuro-rehab need to resolve. And to draw on the best experience to develop ideas that we an then work together to turn into pilots that can be tested. We want to bring realistic and rigourous data in to support these pilots and augment them with realtime improvements to ensure that at the completion of the pilot, a process or product is available for localised modularisation and implementation.
The good news is that we believe these goals are achievable - and soon. As a cancer network, we have extensive experience in working with improvement programmes across different cancer types as well as a strong appreciation of what patient needs are. Augmented by a forward-looking vision on improving the welfare of patients within and beyond cancer and some exceptional skills in honing computer technology to facilitate patients and professionals, we believe we can help engineer a change - now.
We will be setting up a registration page for the workshops and for tracking updates to the website and all new documentation. We'll have this up and running soon. In the meantime, add a comment at the bottom of this page and the moderator will add your details to our distribution database.
The Core Team
The Core Group developing this project are as follows (bios will be added in the future):
Project Lead Charlie Young, North London Cancer Network Email Charlie
Assistant Project Manager Jan Simmons, North London Cancer Network Email Jan
Esther Klagg, Psychologist, Independant
Judi Byrne, Programme Manager, Sue Ryder Care
Elaine Hill, Brain Tumour Unit Manager, NHNN
Emma Townsley, Neuro-oncology Nurse Specialist, NHNN
Orla McKee, Neuro-oncology Nurse Specialist, NHNN Jane Loughlin, Marie Curie
