Core Groups Updates

Georgie Adams, NNNG Communications Officer

Email: nationalnursesnutritiongroup@gmail.com

Website: www.nnng.org.uk

Twitter: @NNNGUK

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/national-nurses-nutrition-group

Happy New Year to all!

Many of you have been working over some of the most challenging months of the year – so, thank you, and we hope you managed to take some well-deserved rest with friends and family.

A new year often means new chapters and in January we were delighted to welcome our new Chair, Natalie Welsh (former Vice Chair). Natalie brings extensive experience as a former enteral industry nurse and works as an experienced Lead Nutrition Specialist Nurse (Matron) at Manchester Foundation Trust. Natalie has a specialist interest in safeguarding.

Myself, Georgie Adams, former Communication and Media Officer, steps into the shoes of Vice Chair and Marketing role. Georgie is the Lead CNS for the NST/IF service in the Royal Devon University HCT, Exeter, Devon and appointed to a Nutrition Nursing role nine years ago.

Sarah Brownlie, Trainee Advanced Clinical Practitioner, Co-Lead Nutrition & Vascular Access Nurse Specialist, Yeovil District Hospital, steps into the Communications and Media role.

Jessica Quayle, Clinical Nurse Specialist – Nutrition, Lancashire Teaching Hospital, Preston joins us, as our very capable NNNG Secretariat and works alongside our newly appointed Admistrator, Phoebe Scaife; a funded role to allow the NNNG to respond in a timely way and deliver on the planning and organisation of our charity.

Ben Booth, Senior Nutrition Nurse and a highly skilled lead from the Norfolk and Norwich University NHS Trust, joins the committee and brings research expertise, along with technical skill and knowledge from the endoscopy suite, delivering the PEG insertion service. Senior Nutrition Specialist Nurse, Charlotte Rubio also joins the Committee. Charlotte has spent her career to date at the University of Leicester NHS Trust, and has developed extensive experience in gastroenterology, while developing the IBD service and successfully completing her non-medical prescribing course.

We also say goodbye to Jo Wakeling, Lead Nurse Nutrition, Royal Berkshire NHS FT Hospital, who steps down after eight years in her Committee role. Jo brought her own personal flair and industry experience. Jo sat on the BAPEN Conference Committee and was instrumental to the success of the 2022 NNNG symposia. We look forward to Jo stepping into a CO-OPT role later in the year, with lots of new experiences to share and compare across the national voice of nutrition nursing.

We are immensely grateful to our outgoing Chair, Claire Campbell, for her leadership over the past three years, navigating the transition and transformation of the NNNG reach, and supporting the creation of new nursing roles and the future of nutrition nursing. On behalf of the NNNG Committee, its membership, and BAPEN “Thank you Claire”. We will miss your calm and considered approach, leading from the front when innovation and creativity matters most.

We look forward to hearing more from Claire in the future, as we intend to invite her back for webinar and conference presentations. Claire’s great work in this area was demonstrated at the 2022 BAPEN Conference at the Nutrition Village discussion on jejunal devices. Claire also chaired our successful symposia ‘Exploring NG Never Events – is NGT standardisation the answer in the modern NHS?’ We invited an expert panel to present and discuss this very valuable statement. Nurses insert and maintain NGT Care in the acute and community setting. More often than not, they are at the point of Never Event risk. If you haven’t had the opportunity to review or catch up with BAPEN Conference 2022, members can access the key note lectures and symposia PPT presentation slides and resources here.

We plan to take this work forward into 2023, inviting Wendy Ling-Relph, Lead Nurse for the Fundamentals of Care and CNS – Nutrition, East Kent University NHS Trust, to our monthly virtual meetings and work aligned to BAPEN's NGSIG Committee. Our aspiration is to work with Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) and Higher Education England, standardising a virtual training pack nationally, in addition to competency assessment. Our vision is also to monitor and manage the quality of NGT care nationally – rather than wait for Patient Safety Initiatives, we create them.

The combination of industry and NHS nutrition experience allows for a very different focus to our membership offer in 2023. We have plans for creating lots of new and fresh resources for our busy members. Very shortly we will begin to plan our annual conference. We were delighted with last year’s event – a very hot July at the Hallam Conference Centre, London. This year we plan something very different and responsive to our nutrition nurse needs. We go North this Year! Watch this space! The favoured NNNG webinars will return and scattered throughout the year, rather than a week-long event.

CO-OPT membership

We want to freshen up this very valued role, providing greater committee visibility and collaboration. We are keen to recruit across all four home countries. The Nutrition Voice pans a diversity of roles: patient safety, governance and the fundamentals of care. We welcome students, Band 4 Nursing Associates, healthcare assistants and allied professional colleagues from our nutrition support multidisciplinary teams. If you have a topic, interest and expertise, we are keen to support with projects, workstreams and a nationwide voice. The CO-OPT member role allows you to volunteer as and when you want. You will be invited to attend four committee meetings per year, provided with opportunities at national and regional events, and acknowledged for work streams and initiatives aligned to the NNNG. Dip your toes and look to apply for a committee member role if that’s what you want, whether registered, unregistered, an academic or manager, clinician or non-clinical role. If you have ‘nutrition’ in your job description or role, we want to hear from you.

Highlights from 2022

• The British Journal of Nutrition (BJN) quarterly nutrition supplement – with 25% discount on the annual subscription - was launched in the Spring 2022. This provided NNNG members with three FREE supplements and journals.
• As Spring arrived, the NNNG wanted to work with BAPEN in supporting the NHS and private healthcare industries to become attractive employers. We wanted to promote a specialist focus for nutrition nurse job opportunities in the UK. Opportunities include substantive, fixed term and secondment roles within acute, community, academia and research. The NNNG LinkedIn page provides a bi-monthly update – including NHS Jobs and those posted on the NNNG Discussion Board. To date we have seen a diverse range of job roles throughout the UK demonstrating the evolution of untrition Support Services and importantly the creation of new roles.
• The NNNG exhibited in June 2022 at The RCN Congress – Glasgow – with the support of BAPEN. We were delighted with the reception received, learning disability, mental health and community nurses were among the many who dropped by to find out more about nutrition nursing. We also caught up with the military who were looking to recruit nurses from the NHS! The army personnel were particularly interested in clinical nutrition and how this impacts on performance and good health. The army really does march on its stomach it seems! We heard an inspiring address from the newly appointed RCN President Pat Cullen; a Key Note from Gordon Brown – now the Ambassador for WHO; in addition to a moving and poignant diary recital from Children’s Poet Laureate, Michael Rosen, who spent 47 days in a London Hospital ICU recovering from COVID-19. The many resolutions included – will the title ‘Nurse’ remain, transgender healthcare needs, international recruitment and its moral reality and the importance of the student nurse – supernumerary status. We were able to network with the RCNs professional arm, accreditation of course scheme, RCNi learning portal and CPD pathways for CNS roles who do not evolve into those of ANP or ACPs. Lots of learning messages were made. Our plan is to attend and exhibit three-yearly.
• In 2022, we began a ‘Nutrition through a different lens’ series for our CN columns, we provide three columns during 2023. To date we have covered a non-clinical/internal mealtime champion role, EDU-Kitchen Initiative in the NHS and Island Life on St Helena: A Dietitian’s Adventure. If you have an unusual or interesting experience, new initiative or service role or plan, we want to hear from you.
• We launched our Private Member Facebook Site, last September 2022. We have seven subject experts who post and set up debates for our membership to participate and enjoy. We cover all manner of subjects in healthcare: business, industry, management and leadership, nutrition. Please email providing your details, interests and availability if you want to be involved: admin@nnng.org.uk

2022 was a really busy year for the NNNG, and we carry that momentum into 2023! We have just launched our newly updated ‘Adult: NG Guidelines’, and look to set up a working party for exploring jejunal nutrition feeding with the aim of creating practice guidelines. We have received a fantastic response to our *FREE membership offer 6/52 Clinical Supervision Programme: Rest, Reflect and Restore Model for Nutrition Nurses, the first of its kind in the UK. Clinical supervision is evolving from one of performance management to one of support and development. The six places allocated are now filled. Angela and Sharlene, our fully CS trained committee members and Nutrition Nurses are excited to facilitate the programme beginning in March. We look forward to hearing updates and progress. We are mindful that during 2019-2022, NNNG Guideline review and updates paused. With an updated CO-OPT member role, we hope to start work on this content as a matter of priority, recruiting nutrition nurses and teams across the country to participate in evidence review.

Linda Cantwell, PENG Chair

Email: peng@bda.uk.comm

Website: www.peng.org.uk

Twitter: @BDA_PENG

Instagram: @BDA_PENG

Happy new year from PENG. As we start 2023, we will take a quick look back at the end of 2022 and towards what PENG has planned in 2023, including the opportunity for a PENG member to attend ESPEN this summer.

Reflecting back quickly on 2022

In October our hybrid face-to-face and live stream study day ‘The Future of Nutrition Support Dietitians: Extended Roles & Advanced Practice’ was a great success. We thank everyone from delegates to speakers and sponsors for such an engaging and inspiring event. Topics covered included: a system level approach to advanced practice, resources available to support BDA members in advanced practice, dysphagia as an extended role, advanced practice in enteral nutrition and intestinal failure, supplementary prescribing in PN, embedding research into clinical practice and developing a business case for extended and advanced practice roles. If you missed out on the event the recording will soon be available to purchase here.

BAPEN 2022 Conference was another highlight that ended 2022. PENG delivered BAPEN’s first ‘Pehabilitation’ symposium and also collaborated with the Renal Nutrition Specialist Group to support a ‘Nutrition in Renal Nutrition’ symposium. Find out more about these sessions in the BAPEN Conference overview in this edition of In Touch .

2023 – what’s in store…

We are currently planning our study day for October 2023 where, following feedback, we will have a focus on ‘Enteral Nutrition and Home Enteral Feeding’. More details and dates will be confirmed later in the year. Planning is also on-going for our 2023 webinars. Our 2023 webinar series will start on Tuesday 28th February with ‘Work it, Write it, Win it’. This webinar will provide a fantastic opportunity to hear the clinical challenges from the PENG 2022 Award winners: how they wrote their abstract and went on to win £500 to attend and present their award-winning abstracts at BAPEN conference 2022. For more information and to sign up to join this webinar, which is FREE for PENG members, please email: peng@bda.uk.com. In April, our Parental Nutrition (PN) Lead Lisa Gemmel will present the results of the PN competency survey along with PENG’s next step for this project. There will also be an update on supplementary prescribing within this webinar.

We are delighted to be working collaboratively with the Critical Care Specialist Group, and in June hope to run a joint half-day webinar, so please follow our social media channels @BDA_PENG for more information on this later this spring.

Final registration is now also taking place for the PENG MSc Clinical Update Course 2023. This award winning four-day residential course at QMU is from June 12th to 15th, for more information click here.

We continue to encourage all those working in enteral feeding to join the Virtual HEF group where this topic is discussed, and updates shared. The group is also keen to grow this as a multidisciplinary forum for Home Enteral Feeds (HEF) so we invite all BAPEN members from local medical, nursing, pharmacy and other AHP colleague to join, details on the PENG website.

Committee news

We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate two of our previous Chairs, Kate Hall and Anne Holdoway for their recent awards at the 2022 BAPEN Conference and thank them on behalf of PENG for their continued voluntary commitment representing and supporting the work of our profession. Kate Hall (PENG Chair 2017-2021) received a BAPEN Roll of Honour award specifically attributed to the tremendous work she does as BAPEN communications officer which, in particular over the last 18 months, has culminated in the delivery and launch of the BAPEN Strategy 2022-2027. Anne Holdoway (PENG Chair 2012-2017) received, in person, her 2020 John Leonard-Jones Medal. This is the highest accolade that the association can bestow and is awarded only to individuals who have given significant and consistent contribution to BAPEN over many years.

PENG would like to give PENG members notice of our online AGM on Tuesday 28th February at 18:00, this will precede our webinar. If you are a PENG member and would like to get more involved with PENG, we specifically have a vacancy for website co-ordinator, for more information please do get in touch.