Claire Williams and Sarah Glencrose from Hounslow & Richmond Community Healthcare NHS Trust’s (HRCH) Children’s Community Nursing Service are creating a Skills Lab thanks to their successful bid to Kingston Hospital Charity’s Inspiration Fund.

The Skills Lab will use the nurses’ specialist knowledge in community children’s nursing and expand their training to more colleagues, as well as to external organisations, parents and carers. Doing so will help address the need within the community for greater training provision for complex care delivery.

Staff will be able to clearly demonstrate their competency and peer review in an environment away from the patient, in a range of scenarios, ensuring they are confident in delivering quality care while lone working, without the need for dual visits to monitor, peer review and competency sign-off for a range of skills.  It also supports those working externally to collaboratively deliver quality care. The Skills Lab will enable more people to access their new and improved training at a time that is convenient to them and the team will also be developing a ‘train the trainer’ model to increase the sustainability of the programme.

The funding that has been awarded has been used to specifically purchase additional manikins and equipment and enhance the teaching package, so that training needs identified can be met.

Claire Williams said:

“The needs of children living in Richmond and Hounslow are changing, and we need to enhance and increase our training offer to meet these needs. Kingston Hospital Charity’s Inspiration Fund is enabling us to create the Skills Lab to support more staff, partner organisations, and parents to get the training they need.”

The Inspiration Fund was created to back innovative staff projects which improve care for our patients or support staff.  This HRCH Children’s Community Nursing Service Skills Lab was one of four projects to receive an award at the end of 2023.