Job overview
An exciting opportunity to work with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) for an experienced and highly motivated Nurse Consultant to lead the CLEAR (Collaborative Leadership for Effective Asthma Referrals) Project. This is a 12-month post.
The postholder will act as the sole clinical and strategic lead for the CLEAR project, pioneering a new outreach and referral model across Kent and Medway. The primary objective is to identify patients with severe asthma who are eligible for biologic therapies or to optimise difficult-to-treat asthma and to create effective, sustainable referral pathways into the Guy’s Severe Asthma Centre.
Main duties of the job
The Nurse Consultant will work autonomously at an advanced level of practice, combining expert clinical knowledge with strategic leadership, service development, education, and system-wide collaboration. The role requires close partnership working with primary care, secondary care, Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), and multidisciplinary teams to optimise asthma care, address health inequalities, and leave a sustainable, embedded model of care at the end of the secondment.
Working for our organisation
We are among the UK’s busiest, most successful foundation trusts. We provide specialist care for patients including heart and lung, cancer and renal services as well as a full range of local hospital and community services for people in Lambeth and Southwark.
We have a long tradition of clinical and scientific achievement and – as part of King’s Health Partners – we are one of England’s eight academic health sciences centres, bringing together world-class clinical services, teaching and research. We have one of the National Institute for Health Research’s biomedical research centres, established with King’s College London in 2007, as well as dedicated clinical research facilities.
We have around 23,600 staff, making us one of the largest NHS Trusts in the country and one of the biggest employers locally. We aim to reflect the diversity of the communities we serve and continue to develop new and existing partnerships with local people, patients, neighbouring NHS organisations, local authorities and charitable bodies and GPs.
We strive to recruit and retain the best staff as the dedication and skills of our employees lie at the heart of our organisation and ensure that our services are of the highest quality, safe and focused on our patients
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
This project aims to enhance asthma care through following a similar process to a previous AAC project carried out nationwide. This will enable the identification of patients who may benefit from timely referral to severe asthma services. The secondary aim is to improve long term sustainability of improvements in asthma care by implementing streamlined referral pathways and developing a business case to ensure long term quality improvement is embedded.
This project aims to increase efficiency in the severe asthma system and increase the number of appropriate referrals for severe asthma services for uncontrolled high risk asthma patients, during the duration of this project, the appointed Nurse Consultant roles include:
1. Proactive identification of uncontrolled asthma patients
2. Increasing the quantity of suspected Severe Asthma patient review in primary care, by approximately 1024 patients.
3. Increase quantity of appropriate patients referred to severe asthma specialist from Primary Care. Expected to be Approximately 25% of reviewed patients.
4. Improve quality of referral to severe asthma specialist from primary care and reduce rejected referral rate.
5. Increase initiation of appropriate therapy where appropriate to do so. It is expected that approximately 180 additional patients will be initiated on biologic therapy during the course of this project.
6. Reduce overall exposure to Oral Corticosteroid.
7. Supporting the education of clinicians involved with severe asthma care, to increase diagnosis, time to diagnosis, and quality of referral to severe asthma services.
Person specification
EDUCATION AND QUALIFICATIONS
Essential criteria
8. Evidence of recent and relevant publications in the field of asthma
9. Non-medical prescribing course
10. Advanced assessment skills course
EXPERIENCE
Essential criteria
11. Experience in managing own caseload and clinic in asthma
12. Experience in supporting the education of clinicians involved with severe asthma care to increase the quality of referral to severe asthma services
13. Experience of facilitating change by collaborating with stakeholders within the field of asthma to produce innovative practice and service development showing improved patient outcomes
PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATION
Essential criteria
14. Ability to frequently cope with working in a stressful environment with intense concentration for periods of up to 40 minutes at a time throughout the day
15. Able to carry out concurrent activities (multi-tasking) work in an unpredictable working pattern
Guy’s and St Thomas’ celebrates, respects and values the diversity of its staff and patients. We review our policies, procedures and practices to ensure that all employees, patients and carers are treated equitable according to their needs. We are actively committed to ensuring that no one who applies for a job, works or study’s at the Trust, or accesses our services is discriminated against on the grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, religion or belief, age, gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity/paternity, or marital/civil partnership.