LATCH supports Rainbow Ward nurses and staff with costs of further training, as Claire Lawson describes below:
“My name is Claire Lawson and I am the paediatric chemotherapy clinical nurse specialist.
I have been part of the ‘Rainbow Ward Family’ for over 20 years, initially as a Ward Nurse before becoming the chemotherapy CNS 5 years ago.
My role is primarily focused on training nursing staff to administer chemotherapy. This may take the form of leading a study day or working alongside the nurses. I work closely with the adult chemotherapy CNS to provide chemotherapy training. We recently achieved accreditation of chemotherapy training for adult nurses. This means nurses will now be awarded degree level credits once they have completed their chemotherapy training. We hope to extend the qualification to paediatric nurses later this year.
I attended the Royal College of Nursing Education conference on 25th April with thanks to LATCH funding.
While at the conference, I jointly presented a poster about the accreditation project. The poster received a lot of interest and it was a great opportunity to share the great work that is happening in Cardiff.
The conference showcased lots of new teaching techniques. COVID-19 forced chemotherapy training to move from traditional classroom based to on-line platforms such as MS-Teams and Google Classroom. It was exciting to see other ways teaching can be delivered including virtual reality! Keeping the nursing staff up to date with training can be difficult when the Ward is busy and there are staffing shortages. Ultimately, our patients and their families will always come first and training can be time consuming. I left the conference though with lots of ideas about how we can improve teaching for nursing staff to ensure the Rainbow Team can continue to provide the best care to our patients.”
LATCH is so happy that the training we fund is going so well and being put to such good use on Rainbow Ward with LATCH families.
