ID #745 Setting up a virtual nurse led clinic looking at long term rehabilitation in brain tumour survivors

Abstract

Brain tumour patients can have long lasting issues resulting from brain injury either from the tumour itself or treatment. As a service, we looked at ways that we could support patients and their families post treatment.

As an MDT comprising of oncologist, physiotherapist, OTs, psychologist and Neuro-Oncology Outreach nurse (NOON) we created a questionnaire for patients and families, looking at ongoing issues around cognitive, educational, emotional and social interaction and physical and functional problems. These questionnaires were discussed in the oncology follow up clinics along with MRI results, and also a rehabilitation MDT. This led to increasing the team’s workload and quickly became unsustainable and had the added consequence of affecting appointment times, etc.

There had been previous discussions around having a nurse led clinic to reduce the pressure on clinic times, which was thought to be a good use of the NOON’s knowledge and skills. It would be to specifically go through the questionnaire, formulating a plan and making referrals to appropriate services, but also give the patients and their families time to discuss and explore any issues identified. The time between appointments is determined between the patient, family and NOON, in response to the issues observed; 3, 6 or 12 months. As the NOON does not need to physically examine the patient, as referrals will be made to services to review, resulting from issues highlighted in the clinic, to reduce the pressure on families, it was decided to make this clinic virtual using Attend Anywhere, which is an NHS virtual platform.

This clinic has been running for 4 ½ years and we will be auditing the response for families and will hopefully have results for this conference.