>>Emma Ward: Back in February I went to the Leading Change, Adding Value conference, where
I’d already initiated the idea of good mouth care but I’d never actually had the nerves
to push it. Speaking to people there it made me realise that it doesn’t matter who you
are within the trust, you can always make change. I wanted to improve the way that we
performed mouth care here in the trust to try and reduce the risk of chest infection.
Coming back from the conference I firstly approached my ward management; she is very,
very approachable anyway so I’m probably quite lucky in that sense. She fully supports
me in everything that I want to do. I told her all my amazing ideas of what I wanted
to achieve and she said just go with it, and anything that we needed to kinda-like trial
that she’d be happy, more than happy for us to trial here in Farley.
>>Kirsty Benfield: Emma started here in the trust back in July 2015 and from her interview
she has shown real enthusiasm and passion for nursing at that very first level. Throughout
her time on the ward she has passionate, enthusiastic, determined, committed; all she wants to be
is a nurse and I’m there to support her in every way that I can.
>>Emma Ward: On the stroke unit, patients are at high risk of a chest infection and
that’s because they depend on you for oral hygiene. They are high risk for aspiration
so if they say have a drink and then it goes down the wrong way then they aspirate and
that’s because of the poor swallow from the stroke. And a lot of people don’t actually
realise that not brushing teeth can create a chest infection, so I looked at the equipment
that we have and if we could improve the equipment then we could improve the mouth care and reduce
the risk of chest infection. I’m very, very, very passionate and a lot
of it began around dignity of patients, around how the patient would feel from not having
their mouth cleaned or teeth brushed or even dentures removed for 24 hours, 48 hours sometimes.
>>Kirsty Benfield: It doesn’t matter what band, what level you are, to be able to have
the encouragement and support from your leader, just shows how far you can go.
>>Emma Ward: The first steps within my campaign was to produce some posters. I figured that
if I started right at the beginning; little steps, little bits at a time so I had a poster
designed. I designed some awareness cards so then staff could keep them in the back
of their ID badges, just little prompts really, just to help them. Mouth care champions; I’ve
developed little mouth care badges with little tooth brushes on them for the champions, lots
of research. Positive outcomes would be better mouth care
within the trust; I think that was my main thing to get across. Patients have said to
me that they are amazed how mouth care has developed and how they do get asked more regularly.
I think it just improves better patient care overall. One of the things I want to look
at is if we are making an impact we know that there is a link between mouth care and pneumonia
but we need to look at are the numbers going to be reduced in the future, so I’m going
to look at 4 months this year; after lots of training, lots of good mouth care within
the trust and then look at the same 4 months next year to see if there is a reduction in numbers.
>>Kirsty Benfield: She goes off to other wards,
other wards ring and want her to go and show them what she’s learnt. She does teaching
for all the new health care assistants that come into the trust; it’s just started and
I think we’ve got a whole way to go really.