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Earlier this year, DBTH joined the national #endPJparalysys campaign. If you are not familiar with the campaign you can read more about it here.
The concept of deconditioning is well known to our Consultant in Care of Older People. In 1947, Richard Asher wrote a landmark paper in the BMJ entitled “The Dangers of Bed Rest”, where he wrote “Teach us to live that we may dread, unnecessary time in my bed; get people up and we may save, our patients from an early grave.”.
It is reported that Older People in hospital can spend up to 83% of their time in hospital lying in bed.
An older person can lose up to 10% of their muscle strength if they are confined to a bed for a week or put it another way, a 10 day stint in bed can lead to the equivalent of 10 years of muscle ageing in someone over the age of 80. For someone who is on the threshold of climbing their own stairs and using the toilet independently prior to their admission, this can be the difference between independence and dependence (i.e needing a package of care or transfer to a care home that wasn’t needed before the admission).
The campaign
These are the reasons we are embracing the #endPJparalysis campaign at DBTH. The message is simple – prevent deconditioning in the hospital by encouraging patients to maintain some normality whilst in and to get up, get dressed and be active.
Our Campaign at DBTH took off following the success of our own Frailty Week in June 2016. Feedback from our staff was that they wanted to know more about looking after Older People across all clinical settings.
We held a Trust wide competition for the best endPJparalysys awareness board and were amazed at the creativity and enthusiasm of our teams. All participating wards received a certificate, acknowledging their contributions and the winning wards received a prized Tea-Pot as a symbol of the importance of social drinking for our patients. Our AMU was the winning ward, which averages an admission take of 50 new patients a day,
You can access our DBTH endPJparalysis posters here, here and here.
Education
We developed our own Person Centred Care (PCC) Study Day, where staff received an introduction to the concept of PCC, Frailty, Falls Prevention* Dementia* End of Life and how staff can #endPJparalysis for our patients. The sessions on the day are delivered by a variety of our staff including a Head of Nursing, Consultants, Cancer Nurses and Sisters from across the site. Over 700 staff have now attended this day and it is run bimonthly in the lecture theatre *to HEE tier 2.
On 1 December, we are running this day with our health and social care partners, with staff from each sector attending to ensure that the same message is spread from hospital to community for the benefit of our patients.
Dates for 2017 are all now fully booked. We will be advertising the 2018 dates as soon as we are able to book the rooms.
Welcome Carers
The Trust signed up to John’s Campaign, an initiative which removes restrictive visiting hours for carers and actively promotes their involvement in treatment and care. You can read about John’s Campaign here https://www.england.nhs.uk/2015/03/change-on-dementia/
You can access the DBTH John’s Campaign posters and carer’s passport by clicking the links.
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