Laurie Cowell is a Regional Nurse Manager at Nutricia. She spoke to us about what her role entails, the important role of nurses in healthcare and how Nutricia Homeward MyConneX is helping both Homeward Nurses, healthcare professionals, and patients.

I've worked at Nutricia for 21 years, and prior to working here I had been a nurse in the NHS, starting my career in large, acute hospitals before moving on to a community hospital. 

I was so excited when I first heard about the job at Nutricia. When I worked in a hospital I was responsible for many patients, but there was a real time pressure and often everything felt rushed. When I spoke to the Nutricia Nurse Manager at the time I was applying for a role, everything she said made me think, ‘I want that job!’ It was the fact that patient visits didn’t feel rushed,if patients needed time to explain a situation you had time to listen to them and help them . If you need to go back and see your patients you can go back and see them to ensure they can feed at home safely. That’s a real luxury that comes with working for a company like Nutricia.

Ultimately, my time at Nutricia has made me realise there can be so much more to nursing. I found I really enjoy working in a commercial organisation, and as I moved into more of a management role I could really see how my work was impacting patients’ lives. I don’t necessarily see patients on a day-to-day basis, but I can see how what I do, through the team I manage, has a positive impact on their care. 

I’m part of a team of Regional Nurse Managers, and we each have a region that we’re responsible for. In total, I’m responsible for approximately 50 nurses across my region. A big part of my role is making sure that our nurse teams are safe in what they do, that they understand the policies and procedures and why we do and don’t do certain clinical procedures. So that means ensuring they have the right equipment for the job and that they are properly trained to carry out their work. Clinical safety is incredibly important, and we need to be absolutely certain that our nurses are armed with the clinical knowledge and skills they need - when they walk into a patient’s home - to risk assess everything they encounter, and then proceed or not proceed with the procedure as appropriate.

Another major part of my role is to continually ask the question, “Are we delivering the best service for our customers?” All areas require different levels and types of nursing service - and it’s my job to measure and monitor that we are delivering that service to the best of our ability. So, for example, that might involve looking at KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to check that we are seeing all referred patients within a specific time frame or ensuring all patients ready to be discharged home are trained within a certain number of hours. The NHS is always under a huge amount of pressure, so we never want to delay a patient going home and therefore freeing up a bed - because the knock on effect is that there can be a queue of ambulances waiting, unable to get their patient the care they require.  

Recruitment is also an important part of my job: making sure we recruit the right nurse, not the first nurse. All of the Nurse Managers play a really active role in the recruitment process. The first line manager, (the Clinical Practice Manager) will undertake a screening process with any prospective new nurses, talk them through the role, and then potentially offer some interviews. At the interview, it’s my job to look at whether the candidate is right for the team in this area. Do they fit? Do they meet the brief? And then if we do offer them a role, there is an onboarding process in order to make sure that the new recruit understands who we are as a business, what is required of them, and ensure they are provided with the right skills and knowledge to deliver their role safely.

So there’s always lots going on, and no two days are ever the same!

Without sounding too corny, my favourite part of my job is when a nurse tells me a story about having helped a patient, and it’s just absolutely lovely. It can be something really small - just a nurse going out of their way to do a little something to make a patient feel better. For example, we had a really 28:57 “ paediatric patient who kept having to go to hospital to get their tube changed, and just by having a Homeward Nurse visit them and gently build up their relationship, that patient can now have their tube changed at home. Which may not sound like a big thing, but it’s a massive thing for that family, and for that child. Just by going in and playing with that child for half an hour or so - without doing anything clinically, just playing with teddy bears and putting them at ease - the patient is then so relaxed that the nurse is changing their tube without them even realising. It’s those sorts of things that I just love hearing about.

Recently, I’ve just finished a 12 month secondment in the MyConneX team, which has been driving an initiative to upgrade our patient management system. The Homeward Nurses also use this system whilst they’re out in the field. I’ve got a real passion for ensuring that our service is future proof, and embraces the latest technology and this a major step in that direction. One example of how technology and MyConneX has improved life for Homeward Nurses is the move from laptops to iPads. A couple of years ago, Homeward Nurses had to use laptops while they were out and about - and if you’ve ever tried to write up clinical notes in a car, with your laptop pressed up against your steering wheel, you’ll know this isn’t easy. There was a widespread feeling that iPads or tablets would work much better - small, lightweight, discrete - so I put together a business case for moving all Homeward Nurses to iPads instead of laptops. We ran a trial, and the results were fantastic - it was so much easier for nurses to write their notes either during or just after the patient visit, and is especially important as it captures all that information when it is still fresh in their mind.

Nutricia Homeward MyConneX can also be used by patients to place their next month's order of medical nutrition supplies and Homeward Nurses have a really important role to play in supporting patients and their carers with the confidence and knowledge to embrace technology in this way. When our Homeward Nurses sit down with the patient - and the patient can see exactly what’s in their order, in what quantities and when it’s due - they get really excited and want to have a look themselves. After that, they think MyConneX is amazing; they realise all the things they can do with it, and how simple it is to use. Any initial apprehension goes away because we’ve built Nutricia Homeward MyConneX with patients as well as nurses in mind, and we can really see it making a difference. 

At Nutricia we put patients at the centre of everything we do - and that’s as true for each individual Homeward Nurse in the field as it is for those of us in managerial roles. The thing that inspires us as individuals and as a company, is asking ourselves each day: “How can we make life better for our patients?”