Title: Enhancing the patient experience; how do we create and manage high quality patients’ experience of care in a complex brain injury setting?

Biography:

Suzie Adam is the Head of Nursing at the Royal Hospital for Neuro disability in London, UK. The hospital specialises in caring for patients with profound disability following acquired brain injury, as a result of major trauma or severe medical illness. Suzie has extensive experience in caring for and leading teams working with some of the most challenging in-patients, from forensic mental health units, challenging behaviour, personality disorder and addictions to CAMHS and post-acute brain injury.

Abstract

Caring for patients who have a range of mental health, physical illness and long term conditions presents us at the Royal Hospital for Neuro Disability (RHN) with a nursing and organizational challenge. Hugely differing needs, from short-stay neuro-rehabilitation to long term care sometimes spanning decades, as well as behavioural challenges and advancing progressive diseases means we need to look critically at how we provide our treatment and care in a way that is truly bespoke.A hospital becoming a home; for many their injury will mean years of being in our hospital, sometimes for the rest of their lives and the impact this has cannot be underestimated. We therefore have evolved as a community as well as hospital and have to continually balance a fine line between normalizing our patients lives, providing leisure and meaningful activity as well ensuring they are safe and still have access to sometimes complex nursing and medical care. Because we are unlike normal hospitals we need to think broadly outside of the box!

Quality of life is the focus and assessable, specially-adapted activities are provided with the support of a large team of volunteers. Using technology and innovation as well as blue-sky thinking have been part of a journey that we are still on.

Supporting our staff with the emotional burden of caring for such a patient group is a huge part of how we can be successful in caring for our patient’s and ensuring they can live their best life. Recognising that their training needs are not just limited to typical nurse competencies and managing physical health has been a new development and one that has seen us create a bespoke training program, accredited by the Royal College of Nursing.