The IBD nursing national audit

Published: 02 December 2011

Background

The RCN Crohn’s and Colitis Special Interest Group has been running for some years and now has nine regional groups that run throughout the UK.These local nursing networks meet to support nurses with an interest in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and collaborate together through a central steering group.

The interest group published the first description of the IBD nurse specialist role (RCN 2007) which provided a structure for this first national audit of IBD nurse specialist roles.

A working party of nurse specialists representing each of the UK countries and paediatrics were bought together to put the audit tool together.

Why audit?

The audit has several aims:

Who was audited?

The audit was aimed at ‘any nurse with a specialist or advanced role in IBD who uses and in depth nursing knowledge of IBD, its associated conditions and medical management. This should involve providing holistic nursing care for patients that complements the roles of the other members of the IBD MDT’.

Methodology

The working party designed the audit based on the role descriptives document (RCN 2007).

The audit was divided into three separate parts:

  1. the demographic of the IBD nurse
  2. the demographic of the IBD nursing service
  3. a two week period of IBD nurse activity.

The RCN designed an online data entry tool with individual sign in for each nurse.

Regional champions were bought on board from each of the regional groups to identify nurses (more than 230) and to support the nurses in their area to submit data.

Data was entered into the tool during May 2011.

Preliminary results

We are still waiting for the final analysis of the results.

There were 179 nurses who submitted data about themselves with 119 different nursing services joining in the audit. We were delighted with the response.

Next steps

So many thanks to the members of the working party and the regional champions who put in so much hard work.

For those of you who participated we are aiming to provide you with reports in the coming months and will be publishing and disseminating the national report over the year.

If you missed out on the audit, or would like to participate in the next one we run, please email Mary Kane

To find out more about the Crohn’s and Colitis Special Interest Group

References

Royal College of Nursing (2007) Role descriptives for IBD nurse specialists.

This work was supported by the RCN and an unrestricted educational grant from Shire Pharmaceuticals Limited. Shire Pharmaceuticals Limited provided the funding for this audit project, but had no control or influence over the content.