Here’s My Number, Call Me Maybe? Developing an award-winning Specialist Palliative Care Telephone Advice Line for Healthcare Professionals.
Here’s My Number, Call Me Maybe?
Developing an award-winning Specialist Palliative Care Telephone Advice Line for Healthcare Professionals.
Interview with Doctor Narmadha Kali Vanan [December 2023]
My name is Doctor Narmadha Kali Vanan. I’m a Specialty Doctor in Palliative Medicine at Ardgowan Hospice in Inverclyde. I recently had the privilege of working on a project with my Community Team focussing on setting up a dedicated helpline for Health and Social Care Professionals (HCPs) working in Inverclyde (pop. over 76,000) seeking Specialist Palliative advice.
The Helpline
The project was about setting up a helpline giving any, and I mean any, HCP working in Inverclyde direct access to Senior Doctors and Nurses. We can receive calls from District Nurses (DNs), Physiotherapists, Doctors, Speech Language Therapists, or Professional Carers who’ve noticed a deterioration in a long-time client’s condition.
Essentially the line functions as a single point of access for HCPs from community to hospital-based colleagues and beyond. The main aim of the helpline is to provide advice to the caller and begin triaging patients, but also to offer proactive involvement of our team such as taking referrals, visiting a patient or offering educational resources.
The proactive responses have been met really positively, if someone phones with a complex situation, we can take a step back and say, “Look, this sounds really tough. How about we do a joint review with your team?”. This allows us to get involved much earlier on in a patient’s journey; we not only know their story when we begin treatment, it also means we’re not strangers to the patient and their family when we arrive to begin our care.
A lot of the role is just being a human at the end of the phone, able to reassure the person they’re doing the right thing. For example, paramedics are unsure of whether to convey a patient to a hospital which has been us at the pointy end of care. We can also help relieve pressure. When someone is in a crisis situation in a house, it’s easy to become overwhelmed so we can become another member of the team.
Initially, we were planning on running the service from nine to five, Monday to Friday. But given the feedback and uptake on the helpline, we have plans to extend this to 24/7. We also hope one day to have the capacity to involve patients.
Exploring Educational Needs
One of the key elements of the project is recognising and addressing educational needs. For example, a Nursing Home may call in about a resident with a breathlessness issue. If we receive multiple calls over a week or two regarding this issue, it points out that they may have a learning need which we can help arrange.
Feedback
Overall, the feedback has been good. People really enjoy having a human at the end of the phone rather than filling in endless forms and being able to ask the questions you want to ask at the time.
The DNs (district nurses) are the ones who have been using the helpline the most. I believe it’s also the first time we’ve officially accepted referrals from professional carers. A lot of people in the community receive care from professional carers and sometimes their voices can sadly be lost in the provision of care for these patients, even though they’re the ones who know them best. Therefore we were keen to make sure they felt supported and trusted to make assessments and flag them up appropriately to members of the hospice team.
We’ve noticed people enjoy having these quick and instant conversations, alternative methods of referral such as email or lengthy forms have gone way down since the line started, so it’s clear that it works for their time commitments.
It’s vital for us to be an integrated healthcare team across Inverclyde and we must do that in a practical way. HCPs time is valuable and limited so they just wouldn’t use a system that wasn’t practical for them. Overall, the number of contacts has kept increasing over the months since we started in February 2023. If the system wasn’t practical, we wouldn’t be seeing this increase!
An unexpected but exciting result of the project is how much it’s brought us together as a care team across Inverclyde. We now know all the DNs by name and we recognise each other by voice on the phone, we were even invited to attend the DN Christmas Party and we were the only non-DN Team there. We thought that was a real win for joined-up and collaborative care in Inverclyde.
Ultimately, it has allowed us to triage patients much more effectively.
Conference
Recently I had the opportunity to present a poster at the 7th Scottish SAS National Conference 2023 in Edinburgh, a conference for Specialist, Associate Specialist and Specialty Doctors and Dentists.
We were lucky enough to win the best poster at the conference which was a real privilege. It was also a fantastic opportunity to liaise with specialist palliative care colleagues across the nation which was really helpful.
A lot of people were extremely interested in what we’ve been doing, and some of them have been trying to do similar things in their region and drawing upon the experiences in our project was quite helpful for them.
We’re keeping in contact with some of them which has been good, we’re excited to work alongside them in the future and watch all of our services grow across the country!
If you would like to find out more about the fantastic work being carried out by Doctor Narmadha Kali Vanan, please contact info@ardgowanhospice.org . Thank you!