Virtual Ward Heart Failure Nurse

Job overview

An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced nurse to join the Virtual Ward at North Middlesex University Hospital. You will visit patients in the community, and also manage appropriate patients with remote monitoring devices.

You will work predominately for Virtual ward with on a joint pathway of care with the Cardiology Consultant at the North Middlesex University Hospital and Lead Heart Failure Nurse for Enfield Community Services.

We are planning to set up a consultant supervised home IV furosemide service and your role will be key to implementing this. Experience of managing IV diuretics and complications of therapy, either as inpatient or outpatient, would be ideal. We also have a daily Heart Failure MDT to discuss case management.

As Urgent Care Response (UCR) comprises of Virtual Wards and Rapid Response, you will be required to give advice as required to patients receiving Rapid Response care.

You will be working within a multi-disciplinary team and the voluntary care sector to support people who are at risk of admissions to hospital or being facilitated with transfer home under the care of the Virtual Ward.

Main duties of the job

As a Heart Failure Specialist Nurse in Virtual Ward, you will provide specialist nursing care for patients living with Heart Failure (HF). You will manage virtual ward patients, reviewing patients at home, by visits or remote monitoring by to ensure optimal medical therapy, promoting self-care strategies and onward referrals to teams such as cardiac rehabilitation and palliative care.

You will share enthusiasm and expertise in HF clinical nursing skills to peers and community carers and work closely to implement management plans with other members of the community team including cardiologists and HF Consultants at North Middlesex University Hospital/Royal Free Hospital and general practitioners. We would welcome and support you to care for our patients.

The ideal candidate would be an Independent Prescriber who is experienced in cardiology, however, if you do not meet the full personal specification, we would certainly consider your application for a band 6 developmental role if you have other relevant experience that may be advantageous in this role.

Detailed job description and main responsibilities

Main duties:

• You will hold responsibility for own caseload within this specialty, working without direct supervision.
• You will have access to advice and support from peers, both internally and externally to the Trust, and from the nurse lead and service manager as required.
• You are required to undertake all aspects of clinical duties as an autonomous practitioner.
• To be aware of and manage any clinical governance issues pertaining to own service and to highlight these to nurse consultant
• To delegate supervision where appropriate and supervise junior staff members within the service.
• To assist and support service lead in implementation of specific changes to practice or service protocols in order to improve quality of care to patients.
• Assist and support audit, evaluation and research projects, co-coordinating their implementation to further own and team’s performance
• To contribute to the delivery of health promotion activities within the service and wider Trust initiatives
• To assist as required in recruitment, selection, CPD, discipline and staff development within own service.
• To supervise/mentor student placements within the service.
• To deal with complaints and act as Trust investigator following appropriate training
• Liaise with other agencies in order to deliver and develop more effective Heart Failure service to the community
• To act as deputy in the absence to the nurse lead for service