By Amy Bowen | Director of Service Development
As the new Director of Service Development for the MS Trust, I am delighted to be part of an organisation that is so dedicated to supporting people with MS. It is a challenging financial time in the NHS and things are changing fast. MS specialist nurses and therapists need to keep making the case for the value of their services and the MS Trust is supporting a number of projects that aim to secure MS specialist services for the future.
The MS Trust has recently produced a report Defining the value of MS specialist nurses. This report assesses the case for the value of MS specialist nursing and identifies more work needed to strengthen the case further. We know that people with MS greatly value and rely on their MS specialist nurses. We want to continue to gather the evidence that will help make that case to those commissioning and designing services in the future.
The report makes some recommendations about more ways to demonstrate the value of MS specialist nursing. One of these is to define how many people with MS a specialist nurse can support. Caseload is a complex issue and depends on the needs of individual people with MS, the number of nurses, the geography of the area (rural or urban) and the other services that are available. It is vital to support work that ensures nurses have a manageable size caseload that allows them to properly meet the needs of people with MS. The MS Trust has begun work to help define the caseload for an MS nurse. The first phase has been undertaken by Dr Alison Leary, a nurse herself, who is expert on the role of the specialist nurse.
We have also done a survey of the MS specialist nurses and used their responses to map out services and the location of the nurses. This is a valuable tool to help make sure services are equally available and to campaign for more services where needed.
Finally, over the next year we will be working closely with some MS nurse teams to help them pull together evidence of the impact of their service and build the skills needed to show that value to managers and commissioners.
We hope that everything that we do at the MS Trust will improve the lives of people with MS. These projects I describe are all part of our MS Nurse Support Programme. We believe this work is vital and that our support for MS nurses and therapists, as well as our education programme, makes a key contribution to ensuring that people with MS get the support they need.
Thank you for supporting this vital work and we hope you will continue to take an interest.
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By Laura Pecival | Fundraising Officer
By Laura Percival | Fundraising Officer
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