ANPThe St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein
In association with
RTV Utrecht
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 22:40
The St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein will invite relatives of patients to help with care tasks. The hospital wants to test whether it can reduce the workload.
Family members who want to help are explained how they can perform certain nursing tasks themselves for their loved ones, such as making a bed, changing a catheter, putting on support stockings and giving an injection.
It is already the case that relatives help, says nurse Annette van Duijn RTV Utrecht. “Then family members suggest helping with washing, for example. But we want to integrate it more into the care.”
Van Duijn immediately emphasizes that it is not mandatory to help when a loved one ends up in hospital. But family members have asked themselves more than once for years if there was anything they could do, says the nurse. “Perhaps you have sat at the bed of someone you love and thought: if only I could do something, I feel so powerless.”
With the trial, the hospital hopes that it will give the nurses extra time to do other activities:
The workload is now higher than when she started in the hospital, says Van Duijn. “We also do more. You used to no longer operate at a certain age. That is different now. The patient is becoming more complex due to age, but the length of stay is getting shorter. So we have to provide more care in a shorter time,” she says .
The expectation is that the demand for care will only increase due to the aging population. That is why the hospital now wants to invest in a solution for the long term.
The help of family members is not only nice for the staff. Van Duijn thinks that the transition home will go more smoothly when the patient and the family have experience with certain care tasks. “We now often hear that patients fall into a black hole when they come home. The safety of the hospital is suddenly gone,” says the nurse.
She thinks it’s safe as long as the instructions and guidance are good. “I think we should take our responsibility in this. So if you explain something to family members and you doubt whether things are going well, then suggest that home care is doing it.”
Better care
A working group of the hospital has looked into reducing the workload. In addition to the idea of inviting family members to help, the hospital will also experiment with other measures.
For example, the hospital wants to work with an app in which patients can enter data themselves, such as information about allergies. That saves a lot of administration for the nurses, says Van Duijn. “Many patients end up in the hospital and then everything is taken off their hands while they can do a lot themselves.”
Van Duijn hopes that these measures will allow her and her colleagues to spend more time with patients and provide better care. Trials will begin this fall. The question of whether family members want to help will be asked at the departments of urology in Nieuwegein and oncology in Utrecht.
2023-07-31 20:40:53
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