Paediatric Nursing in Leicester

Our Hospitals

Leicester Hospitals is comprised of three hospitals located in the city of Leicester; the Leicester Royal Infirmary, the Glenfield Hospital and the Leicester General Hospital.

Leicester Royal Infirmary (LRI) is located in the city centre. It provides the majority of services for Emergency and Paediatric care for Leicestershire, whilst the Glenfield Hospital includes the East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre and ECMO support.

What's happening?

We recently completed development of a new £48 million Emergency Department (opened Q2 2017). This exciting new build will see the Children’s Emergency Department increasing in size and capacity to include a Paediatric Observation Ward.

Development

We help with your professional development

Our department sees children attending with a variety of presentations, from acute and life threatening medical conditions, to trauma and minor injuries. With this in mind, our nurses need to have a broad knowledge base and a range of skills. We can offer career progression that will challenge you both clinically and as a manager.

Our senior nurses manage care delivered in one of the busiest Emergency Departments in Europe, while our Emergency Nurse Practitioners and Paediatric Advanced Nurse Practitioners provide the highest level of clinical care.

Education Practice Development team

We have a dedicated Emergency Practice Development Team to provide support with your continued learning within your area of work. This team will not only ensure your mandatory training and corporate needs are up to date, but will also work shoulder to shoulder with you, making sure that you are aware of how every clinical process and piece of equipment in the department works.

Preceptorship

In such a busy department, we want to make sure you are fully supported from the moment you arrive. We offer a ‘buddy’ system for our new starters where you will spend your first few weeks working alongside a nurse of the same grade, helping you to settle in and learn the processes. You will also have an allocated mentor who will support you through the appraisal process, reflecting on your practice and planning further development.

Close links with De Montfort University (DMU)

It is important that nurses continue to learn after registration. Our close links with DMU allow us access to courses specifically designed to help with nurse development. Your appraisal process will help you identify further educational needs and then the Emergency Practice Development Team will guide you in accessing DMU programmes.

Band 5 Development

As a Band 5 nurse, you will need to develop as a clinician and as a manager. Through collaboration with your mentor and the Emergency Practice Development Team, we will see that you learn the essential skills of an emergency nurse. These skills will range from suturing, plastering and cannulation, through to assessment and triage, Advanced Paediatric Life Support (APLS) and the Advanced Trauma Nursing Course (ATNC). If you already have emergency nurse skills and can offer evidence of your previous learning, the Leicester Clinical procedure Assessment Tool process (LCAT) will see that time is not wasted in repeating training.

Support

Quality Nursing Care

The staff here at the University Hospitals of Leicester developed ideas about how all people accessing the hospitals whether patients, visitors or staff, should be treated. These ideas were turned into the five values, collectively named ‘Caring at its Best’, that we as a department are wholly committed to:

If you have an idea which matches these core values, no matter how grand or small, then you will be encouraged and supported in developing it for the benefit of your patients or work colleagues.

Training

Of course, we have access to nursing courses run by De Montfort University and put our nurses on a variety of advanced life/trauma support courses held both within our own clinical education department and nationally, but our education and training goes way beyond this.

We have enormous pride in working as one team and as such we meet monthly in our bespoke Critically Careful Forum to review our previous month’s activity. This serves an opportunity highlight the good work that we do and to identify and learn from both what went well and what didn’t go so well.

We also have weekly Advanced Simulation Training and bi-annual simulation training days, using state-of-the-art mannequins to re-enact challenging clinical cases. This work has been nationally recognised with staff representatives at the Royal College of Paediatrics conference (nursing and medical) and the International Paediatric Simulation Symposium.

Specialist Nurse Roles

Staff who have a special interest or skills are encouraged to develop these and become sources of information and support for other staff. We have Emergency Nurse Practitioners (ENP’s) and Paediatric Advanced Nurse Practitioners (PANP’s) working in our department. Our ENP’s see and treat patients attending with minor injuries while our ANP’s see and treat patients attending with any complaint. Both these groups support our nursing and medical teams in delivering the best clinical care possible.

Listening into Action (LiA)

Our Chief Executive John Adler, has introduced the LiA approach – this gives all staff the opportunity to put forward ideas and take action to improve services for patients provided by our staff and for staff benefit. We have now developed the Nursing into Action (NiA) approach, led by Ward Teams.

International Nurse Recruitment

As part of our wider campaign we have recruited number of nurses from Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Republic of Ireland, who have embraced the opportunities offered in Leicester. Their enthusiasm is infectious and they have positively contributed to the nursing culture as well as patient care within UHL.

Interested in Working With Us?

Register your interest and we can get in touch with more information: