Harlow hospice gets creative over staffing amid nursing shortage

A hospice is changing how it recruits amid a national shortage of nurses.

St Clare's Hospice in Harlow, Essex, said a combination of specialist staff due to retire and Covid pressures had made staffing more difficult.

It said it had "got creative" to attract and use other healthcare workers, including paramedics, so it could offer more community-based care.

The hospice said it wanted to show people how rewarding working in palliative care could be.

It has held recruitment fairs to encourage nurses and other healthcare staff thinking of leaving the profession to consider moving into palliative care instead.

Carolanne Brannan, director of patient care, said: "It is really difficult at the moment. A lot of research has gone into specialist palliative care and it's showing in the next 10 years a lot of our specialist workforce will be retiring, so we're especially feeling it.

"So with Covid and that happening together, it's making it quite difficult to recruit people into hospice and specialist palliative care as a speciality."

Ms Brannan said the hospice started finding and using other clinicians, such as paramedics.

"Necessity was the mother of invention but actually the diversity of thought with these different professions together works incredibly well... we did it because we had to, but now we do it it because we want to," she said.

She added that the "need was getting bigger" for end-of-life healthcare professionals as people lived longer and that giving people choices about community-based care was important.

The hospice said any non-specialist staff recruited would be given on-the-job training to ensure they were able to offer appropriate palliative care.

Patient Bev Packford, who receives community care and has previously been an inpatient, said relationships with hospice staff were key to patients.

She said: "Hospices are not places you go to die. It's about the quality, rather than the quantity, of the life they promote."

Ms Packford said she worried some healthcare professionals who may have looked at entering palliative care had been put off because of the trauma of Covid.

However, she encouraged people thinking of leaving the profession to consider such a move.

Clinical nurse specialist Cate Simmons is also encouraging other health care professionals to find out more about palliative care.

She said the environment is "quieter, calmer, kinder and more personal" than in hospitals.

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