Paediatric Primary Care Nurse

Whittington Health NHS Trust has a ground-breaking, friendly, and highly regarded Paediatric Primary Care (PPC) Team delivering care for Children in the community of Islington. An exciting opportunity has arisen for an enthusiastic, passionate, and highly motivated paediatric nurse, to join the paediatric community team at The Whittington Health NHS Trust. The successful candidate will join a forward-thinking team of experienced nurses, with extensive opportunities to enhance and develop competences and skill set when providing patient care in autonomous nurse led clinics. The post holder will be a highly visible senior nurse and as such expected to provide specialist knowledge, advice/support, and clinical expertise to the Islington primary care staff regarding CYP.

Working as a team player, your role will require excellent physical assessment skills, partnership working and a strong commitment towards achieving the outcomes to improve the health and wellbeing of this patient group. You will be expected to demonstrate clinical expertise and governance in all aspects of your work, being supported by robust organisational supervision, guidelines, and policies.
Facilitate independent nurse led clinics for the conditions specified.
Mange these conditions confidently with an aim to gain optimum control and discharge back to the care of the GP or if this is not possible refer up to secondary care for further intervention and support.
Assess, plan, implement and evaluate programmes of care for children and young people with long term conditions.
Act as a visible role model and expert practitioner in primary care, providing teaching and upskill staff within GP practices and health centres.

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.

The Paediatric Primary Care Service is commissioned by Islington CCG, and works collaboratively with stakeholders including GP practices, the children’s community nursing team, secondary care departments, tertiary care and the commissioning team with an aim to educate, support and empower families to better manage their chronic long- term conditions in the community.

The Paediatric Primary Care service is provided to children and young people aged 3 months - 18 years, living in the London Borough of Islington who present with wheeze, asthma, eczema and constipation. One of the service aims to reduce hospital admissions where possible and prevent re-admission.

The post holder will help to drive an innovative service which involves facilitating nurse led clinics within either GP practices or Health Centre’s for the conditions listed, this will be in both face to face and virtual formats. The paediatric primary care team engage effectively with both primary, secondary and tertiary care provisions as patients can move between providers. Patients can be referred into the service via their GP or practice nurse, community nursing team or as part of a step-down process initiated by secondary care to support patients with their agreed management plan.

The post holder will be expected to confidently complete history taking, perform physical examination, initiate effective treatment and care planning, with routine follow up to ensure patients are responding to treatment and to assure compliance to treatment. The post holder will ensure that effective communication with GP’s are maintained when requesting prescriptions and work within the CCG’s medicine managements guidance.

The post holder will support the team leader, community matron and assistant director of children’s and family Services to embed and develop the Paediatric Primary Care service.

The post holder will be supported by an integrated team approach with Practice Nurses and encouraged to develop their skills to provide effective care.

The post holder will contribute towards service development to encourage and support management of chronic illness within primary care to aim to minimise hospital attendance, admissions, and re-admissions.

The post holder will be expected to act as a visible role model and expert practitioner in paediatric primary care and will be expected to ensure the provision of high quality safe and effective holistic care to all children and young people.