Dietetics | Celebrating BWC Spirit

By Carolyn Patchell, Head of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietetics

What was your experience of the pandemic?

It was a challenging and stressful time for everyone, and it reinforced what an absolutely fantastic team we have, both in Dietetics, and also across the whole Trust. Everyone contributed to making new ways of working effective and helped each other.

Many people - staff, parents, children and young people -  were having a really tough time and were stressed and frightened, and it brought out the best in our team members who stepped up to support others both practically and emotionally.

What was the hardest part?

Keeping business going as usual, our children and families continued to need our support and we had to very quickly find ways to do that, which we did without a break in service. Not physically seeing all of our patients and colleagues was really difficult.

We missed working physically together. Our team are not just colleagues, we are also friends, and we missed the informal chat and updates, and the regular cakes and ‘Fuddles’

We struggled initially to make our virtual reviews effective. Many families did not have the means to weigh or measure their children which made our assessments difficult, but we quickly developed processes to improve this. We found doing back-to-back telephone clinics exhausting and changed our caseloads around to enable some breaks from this. Some of our families were really stressed and significant time was spent on the telephone giving them time to talk and offering help where we could or offering a listening ear

How did you cope?

With the help of a great team. Nothing was too much effort, without exception, everyone worked exceptionally hard with a can-do attitude to make things work. We helped each other practically and supported each other emotionally. The whole team were flexible and adjusted quickly to new ways of working, contributing new ideas to improve things.

We adopted new modes of communication via Pando (we are one of the top users groups on the Pando website!), we embraced the use of electronic notes and developed ways to effectively assess patients remotely. We created a ‘how-to’ guide for remote nutritional assessment of our patients showing families how they could measure weights and heights at home without expensive specialist equipment and lent scales to our most vulnerable outpatients to enable parents to accurately weigh their children at home so that we could have effective and safe virtual consultations.

We also made time for each other to regularly check in and make sure everyone was OK.

What did you learn?

Lots! The true value of team working and how professional and flexible everyone is. That you can transform service delivery extremely quickly if you have to.

I don’t think we realised initially just how stressful lockdown was for our families too, and how frightened some of our children and young people were and we did what we could to support them during what was a really difficult time for them, giving them time to talk to us outside of our clinical reviews

We learnt that a traditional face-to-face model of patient review is not always necessary and with care and planning, virtual consultations can be effective for some patients, some of the time. We are currently putting together a hybrid model for patient reviews to better meet the needs of families, reducing the need for them to travel to Hospital unless it is necessary.

As lockdown eased and children returned to school we realised that with planning, we could review them virtually at school, meaning that they didn’t need to be taken away, with the parent joining from home or their workplace.

We also learnt that although we couldn’t share our traditional cakes, there are a wide range of COVID friendly individually wrapped snacks available!

How do you think it changed the team?

The whole experience has increased pride in the team; everyone is so proud that they contributed to seamlessly moving into new ways of working without a break in patient care or cancellation of any appointments. One of our strengths is that we pull together in a crisis ‘all for one and one for all’ and it has brought us closer together as a team as a result.

Beyond your team, who has inspired you during the pandemic?

Not a single individual, but all of the staff who showed bravery and compassion in offering mutual aid to UHB, many of them in their own time, even though had busy work and family lives themselves. I heard such lovely examples of the personal care our staff gave to patients, and the support they offered to the teams at UHB.