Parish Nursing Update Summer 2022

Dear All,

I trust this finds you well and enjoying the summer weather. Such a great opportunity to get out and enjoy the countryside while improving the health of mind, body and spirit.

Six months into 2022 and a lot has been happening. Of course none of this would be possible without your support in prayer, funding and encouragement. Once again thank you!!

The stall within The Moor Market

We have seen eighty-eight clients in the first six months of 2022, roughly equal numbers of male and female. The majority do not attend a church and we continue to see a variety of faiths within the group. The group is a mixture of shoppers and stall holders. We’re always amazed at the dedication of the stall holders, working long hours to provide for our community with very little time for self-care. They drop in for a health check or to check out a health concern. We have found several clients with high blood pressure, they are now on medication and we’re able to monitor their BP to inform the GP without the need for repeat visits to the surgery. Your support is truly life saving!

We also run health focussed events and support national health days/ weeks.

Breast Cancer Now’s Wear It Pink Campaign

Kath, a specialist in children’s health, from NHS Sheffield Clinical Commissioning Group

John Birkhill (who is close to raising £1M for Macmillan) and Michaela

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We ran a weight loss challenge over twelve weeks with good results in not only weight loss but improved mental health and positive lifestyle changes. Well done to Ben who won the challenge and continues to do well.

We are developing our work with a variety of health promotion partners. Cavendish Cancer Care has an information hub within the market. This joint working has a positive impact on our clients. We often signpost to the hub for information about support services for clients who have family members dealing with cancer and the staff on the hub signpost clients to us if they have visitors with symptoms they’re concerned about.

Macmillan Cancer care funded the purchase of self-examination models and these are regularly used on the stall and on health promotion events in the community. It was agreed by all that these are a great way to start, what can be, a very difficult conversation.

We also met Emma, one of the communication team at the Sheffield clinical commissioning group, She’ll be helping to share out campaigns on their media and has been showing us some of the wonders of Tik Tok so watch this space!!

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Eve and Adam, models for self-examination awareness campaign.

Outreach Service

We’ve seen eighty-nine clients on outreach the majority are male and although not all are sleeping rough they have complex needs. Partnership working continues and we’re regularly joined by a drug and alcohol outreach worker and will be supporting the early morning outreach team in the future.

We continue to support the multi-agency outreach days of action and are helping to develop a health map in conjunction with Help Us Help. This was requested by the Sunday Centre who support this client group but have limited time and resources to address health needs. Many clients don’t have internet access or a mobile phone so the focus of the map will be services which are easily accessible or available via a free phone number which they can access from a payphone. We’ll be looking at how we can support them more with potential for a nurse drop in on site.

Your funding enables us to provide those on the streets with a hot drink, food, warm clothing, sun cream, cold water, sleeping bags, taxi fares to appointments, bus tickets to accommodation and mobile phones. Our partnership working means we can also support more individual requests such as a television for a client placed in protective accommodation and a new pair of trainers.

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Sanctuary space within the church

We continue to meet a variety of clients within the church. We don’t currently have the capacity to allocate time slots for this but attend Mass each of our working days and allow time afterwards to catch up or to offer a cup of tea to new faces. The local probation office is round the corner so we can often signpost those released from prison to support services or provide a safe place for them to wait for an appointment. Some of our conversations with those who wander in are heart-breaking and others lift our spirits. The beauty and peace of St Matthew’s continues to have a positive impact.

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Walking group

The Walking Group continues, ably led by Marjorie with support from Jean. The walks are getting longer as members of the group build their stamina and there are plans for going further afield too. Members of the group value the time together and have commented on the effort Marjorie and Jean put into making the walks informative and interesting. There’s always a buzz about the place after a walk with people sharing what they’ve learnt or continuing conversations started.

Training

Marjorie and I were able to attend the Parish nursing Ministries UK symposium. It was great to meet up face to face after so long and to catch up with news of other projects and to update our knowledge and skills.

We also held a team training day to update on mandatory training topics and had a time of team building while out walking in the countryside. Special thanks to the Harry Bottom Charitable Trust for funding this event.

Marjorie and I continue to attend the community of practice meetings with our regional lead and other nurses in our area. We also have regular clinical and spiritual supervision. The team of volunteers also have spiritual direction in place and have access to quiet days as needed. We need to look after ourselves to be able to look after others.

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Interventions

Interventions continue to increase. Below is a summary

	JAN-MAR	APR-JUN	TOTAL
TOTAL INTERVENTIONS	591	921	1512
REDUCING SOCIAL ISOLATION	183	277	460
HEALTH PROMOTION	48	164	212
MENTAL HEALTH INTERVENTIONS	72	87	159
PROFESSIONAL LIAISON	48	82	130
SPIRITUAL INTERVENTIONS	46	67	113

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Reducing social isolation continues to be our most frequent intervention. For some we may be the only social interaction they have. Others value the fact they can call in to keep us up to date with how they are progressing in reducing anxiety and reengaging with their community.

Stall events have enabled us to increase health promotion interventions and increased interagency working has enabled us build a team around our clients with more complex needs.

Income and Expenditure

	2021 total	2022 Jan- June
Employment costs Including pension and payroll costs	19853.03	11719.48	The increase reflects an increase in paid hours from 22.5 to 30 per week. The cost of this has been covered by our covid recovery grant received from Sheffield City Council.
Volunteer hours saved salary costs	£7752	£6927	Volunteering hours have increased compared to this time last year, with significant savings for the project
Outreach costs	1603.93	1061.43	The increase in outreach costs reflects both our increase in client numbers and increase in costs. For example one pint of milk has risen from 65p to 95p in the last 3 months and our telephones have risen from £15 to £24 each
IT/ phone costs Costs	1100	866.41	The largest expense last year was for computers for our volunteers to access online learning and signpost clients to help. They have all had software upgrades this year. Thanks to Ian Burgess our development worker who registered us for free G suite services and free Microsoft services, this along with the end of phone contracts means we will see significant savings in the second half of this year.
Hospitality	62.06	311.41	The largest hospitality expense this year has been hosting Parish Nursing Sunday. With over 100 in attendance and great feedback about the quality of the hospitality we see this as money well spent and as a way of saying thank you to all our supporters.

Looking to the future

Much of our funding comes to an end this year. We have a funding applications team who will be focussing on applications to secure funding for a further three years and with the evidence we have gathered we feel confident that we will achieve our goal. We are extremely grateful to Sheffield city council for their contribution via the covid recovery fund.

We would like to employ an additional nurse with mental health training, This will of course be part of our funding bids going forward, in the meantime some of the money has been used to increase my hours to increase our offer at a time of transition out of covid and increased pressure due to the cost of living crisis.

Poppy has joined the team as an admin volunteer and has been promoting our work and helping to sort our resources. She will be providing assistance with recruiting more volunteers in all areas of our work.