Critical care and flight nursing webinars

We know how challenging it can be to participate in that all essential professional development. It can be tough to juggle staying up to date professionally while maintaining a good work-life balance.

We hope this series of webinars, brought to you by experts in their field will offer convenient and fulfilling continuing education which may contribute towards ongoing career development and service improvement.

We will be adding to the series throughout 2020 and 2021 and would very much like to hear your comments and suggestions for future topics. To learn more about the Critical Care and Flight Nurse Forum Committee, who developed this resource, please click here.

Welcome to this three-part webinar series on opt out organ donation education. The first part is by Cathy Miller, where she discusses the organ donation pathway (the critical care perspective). The second part is by Phil Watson. Co-presented by the RCN Critical Care and Flight Nursing Forum and the RCN Emergency Care Association, Phil discusses organ donation and the Emergency Department. Finally, we have a session by Gail Mander on tissue donation.

This webinar, which took place in November 2020, brings together colleagues from the UK and Australia in a session to not only hear from senior nursing leaders setting the context in which we find ourselves professionally but also first-hand experiences of frontline staff working through a pandemic. We hear from the Presidents of both Colleges of Nursing as they explore nursing in a post COVID-19 world.

In this webinar, Ricky Sherriff Short, steering committee member of the RCN Critical Care and Flight Nursing Forum, talks to Murray Short about his dual role as a charge nurse in critical care at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow, and in a critical care outreach nurse-led service in a cancer treatment centre.

The RCN Critical Care and Flight Nursing Forum provides flight nurses with an opportunity to network with other flight nurses. The forum also organises events for flight nurses as part of revalidation and to share best practice. Our annual flight nurse study day has run successfully for a number of years and is always a 'sold out' event as the only space to bring together flight nurses, discuss and advance the profession and meet unique Continuing Professional Development needs.

Besides CPD, maintaining clinical skills and feeling confident when caring for patients at 40,000ft is vital and every repatriation presents its own unique challenges. However, much of the repatriation work came to an abrupt end in March 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, many flight nurses had to defer to other nursing work during the past few months. Our series of chats with flight nurses hopes to give us an insight into what this was like.

Sarah West is a Critical Care Nurse that has worked in London hospitals including London Bridge Hospital where she was a Junior Sister and Outreach Nurse. Sarah has been working in Curacao in the Caribbean since January 2021 as part of an International Covid-19 Response team.

Dawn is a committee member of the Critical Care and Flight Nursing Forum and was interested to find out what her colleagues have been doing during this period. She is also a flight nurse and medical case manager for an assistance company and has been in the industry for about 10 years. Her background is in critical care nursing and she returned to clinical work in the NHS in March after a gap of 3 years. During the past few months, she has taken on an additional role assisting HR with the compliance work for COVID-19 in relation to staff and the office as well as a role of volunteer to support BAME staff in the local NHS Trust.

Tony is a critical care nurse and continues to work within the NHS doing clinical shifts. He is also a medical case manager for an Assistance company. Tony has a wealth of experience in medical case management and many years of experience as a flight nurse.

Jill is a keen cyclist who hails from New Zealand. She is an experienced Critical Care Nurse working in London with paediatric and adult patients on an ad hoc basis. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jill was fully immersed in the care of these patients. Jill is also a medical case manager and flight nurse and has extensive experience in this field. Jill recently did her first repatriation from Barbados since March 2020.

The RCN Critical Care and Flight Nursing Forum in conjunction with the Intensive Care Society is proud to present this workforce wellbeing webinar, "What do our critical care nurses need now?". The webinar is one hour in total and a very useful session for critical care nurses in recent times.

Author
Giles Hall, RN, Head of Quality – Security Services, International SOS, UK

As nurses we understand both the patient’s medical condition and how the environment could impact their condition.  But, how well do we understand the security environment and how our personal profile and the profile of the patient could affect the risk level of the mission? Non-medical risk is evident in all stages of a medically escorted mission, the Six Principles of Personal Security will give you a framework for understanding what you can do to identify and mitigate this risk.