Job responsibilities
JOB DESCRIPTION
Clinical Nurse Specialist
Major functional areas reporting to you.
None
POSITION DESCRIPTION
JOB PROFILE SUMMARY Briefly describe the job, i.e. the major purpose of the job function in one or two sentences.
The Clinical Nurse Specialist is responsible for supporting patients throughout their illness, from pre-diagnosis onwards, so that the patient is well supported throughout. This is often referred to as a key worker.
They care for patients throughout their diagnosis and treatment. They take a key role in supporting the patients during their treatment and are an important member of the multidisciplinary team (MDT). The Clinical Nurse Specialist is a critical and consistent contact point for patients who often will need to interact with different parts of the hospital in order to receive optimal treatment.
The Clinical Nurse Specialist will;
- Build trust with the physicians and patients through multidisciplinary care coordination.
- Assist in educating patients about their disease so they can make informed decisions about their care.
- Provide emotional support to the patient, family and caregivers.
- Signpost patients to support networks, internally and externally.
- Advocate for the patient in development of the treatment plan.
- Manage a caseload within their own scope of practice, with support from the wider clinical team.
III
PRINCIPAL DUTIES Categorise the job into the 5 8 major areas of responsibility. Divide these into steps explaining the main activities. Please include responsibilities for staff management, training, managing resources/budgets and any responsibilities for inputting to or developing policy.
A
Clinical
- Be a key worker throughout the patient pathway, regardless of facility and when the patient is transferred between facilities for different treatments.
- Manage a clinical caseload, working to coordinate care and provide easy access for ongoing support for patients.
- Work within a clear care pathway, refer to other professionals and signpost to other agencies as appropriate.
- Assess the patients holistic needs regularly throughout their treatment pathway ensuring that any needs are supported through appropriate signposting
- Promote self-management, risk stratifying patients into who can self-manage following education, those who will need guided support to self-manage and those who will require ongoing, face to face support, in order to support people to live with and beyond the illness and its treatment.
- Assess the patients information needs and make sure they are aware of the full range of resources and services available within and beyond HCA, including recognised charities.
- Support the patient, their next of kin and family/carers delivering excellent evidence based individualised and personalised care.
- Enable patients to understand complex medical information to help them make informed decisions regarding their care and treatment.
- Demonstrate safe clinical judgement in evaluating, interpreting and documenting the outcomes of nursing and other interventions including the evidence underpinning clinical practice.
- Order and analyse routine investigations relevant to clinical specialty, with appropriate training.
- Respect patient dignity and privacy at all times, in line with the NMC code of conduct and the HCA privacy and dignity policy.
- Facilitate and organise a patient support group.
Leadership and Management.
- Continuously evaluates nursing practice and makes changes where appropriate to drive service improvement.
- Contribute to the management and promotion of services, leading to the delivery of high quality, cost effective care
- Take responsibility for implementing and monitoring specific delegated improvement projects.
- Participate in clinical audit within the department and changing practice where appropriate.
- Support in the development of patient focused education, including training to self-manage ongoing consequences of treatment
- Promote patient and public experience feedback through local initiatives to drive innovation and change.
- Responsible for effective communication between all service providers across the care pathway.
- A role model with advanced communication skills and expertise.
- Skilled in conflict resolution and negotiation when dealing with difficult or challenging situations
- Work across professional boundaries using creative reasoning and problem solving
- Provide clinical leadership to others
- Actively participate in multi-professional meetings, acting as patient advocate and representing nursing and AHP views
- Provide specialist education and training to other professionals involved in patient care.
- Collates and records quantitative and qualitative data to provide evidence of productivity, outcomes and quality, through audit and research.
- Support the development of the service annual report.
- Engage with Lead nurses to contribute expertise and experience to supports service priorities.
- Promote the service and clinical excellence by contributing to publishing and presenting innovations, audit and research locally, regionally and nationally.
- Demonstrate continuous evaluation of nursing practice and make changes where appropriate
- Responsible for escalating concerns in treatment or care through the appropriate channels
- Lead on clinical incident investigations relevant to clinical area, and share learning.
