Call handlers for community nursing referrals: importance of collaborative working

Developing a service can be complicated, knowing where to begin can be bewildering and many practitioners lack the skill set to solely undertake improvement initiatives (Lees, 2010). This article will illustrate how a group of professionals worked together as a team and used improvement methodology in a project to radically change the operating of community nursing services. The author is a professional lead in district nursing who was sponsored by the Head of Service and Professional Head of Community Nursing to join a project team formed to design, create and implement a centralised referrals system for community nursing. This article concentrates on the system created by the author, although learning from participating in an improvement project team will be explored, focusing on the value of shared expertise for successful outcomes.

Over the years, the NHS organisation involved in this project had explored ideas around creating a centralised community nursing referrals system, although no attempts were made at a system-wide level. This changed following a serious incident, which concluded that the community nursing communications systems were impacting on the responsiveness of the service to patients needing care and, therefore, needed to be improved, as a matter of priority.