In this article, the author explores the role of the stoma nurse in the community, and how this can support recent initiatives such as The Enhanced Recovery Programme and the High Impact Actions for Nurses by providing ongoing care in the secondary care setting. This can lead to an improvement in quality of care and patient outcomes, which is imperative in the current NHS environment where anecdotal evidence suggests that the financial goals managers are required to meet are leading to constraints on the number of home visits that the stoma nurse can carry out (Breckman, 2005). The case study presented within the article shows how the stoma nurse worked with the community team to manage a young woman following a traumatic bowel perforation experience.
This article will demonstrate how the Royal College of Nursing's (RCN's) Principles of Nursing Practice (2010) and the 6Cs (Cummings and Bennett, 2012a ; 2012b) can be applied to stoma care nursing. The multidimensional role of the stoma care nurse means that he or she is well placed to improve quality and standards in stoma nursing care. Stoma care nurses provide direct patient care and can play a vital part in helping patients with a stoma, a long-term condition, ensuring that their patients get the best possible care (RCN, 2010). The poster contained within this article was displayed at the Association of Stoma Care Nurses (ASCN) national conference in Harrogate in October 2014 and was voted the overall winner. The authors of the article and the poster are stoma care nurses working in the acute and community settings and, between 2013 and 2014, they completed the RCN's Clinical Leadership Programme (RCN, 2005). The NHS Plan (Department of Health, 2000) identified the importance of leadership and the necessity of remodelling the NHS around the needs of service users. With this in mind, using the Principles of Nursing Practice and the 6Cs within stoma care demonstrates development with a consistent focus on patient care.
The stoma care nurse specialist's role involves caring for patients who have had stoma-forming surgery for a variety of different conditions including bowel cancer. In this article, Julie Barwell investigates issues of truth telling in cancer care and reviews questions regarding should be the first to be told about a patient's illness and whether patients and families want to know even when the news is not good.
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