Peterborough nursing teams lead research for patient care with long term conditions

Peterborough nursing community teams have been leading research into helping patient care with chronic illnesses.

The community nursing teams at CPFT have been testing an intervention to enable patients with long-term conditions to address their support needs and contributed to research published in an international journal.

The research is funded and supported by Marie Curie, UEA School of Health Sciences and CPFT. The team are currently helping deliver the Support Needs Approach for Patients District Nursing. (SNAP-DN) The evidence based health care offers person-centred care for patients with chronic of progressive conditions which will help patients identify and discuss their support needs.

The Trust’s respiratory team successfully ran the pilot to test SNAP with patients managing severe respiratory illnesses. Which has been supported by the Windsor Research Unit and working with researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and University of Cambridge.

Team Leader in CPFT’s District Nursing Team, Nicola Zolnhofer said: I really enjoyed working on the SNAP pilot and want to ensure we can offer

beneficial research to everyone we care for in the community. Any new approaches that can improve the patient experience, their care and treatment are worth testing, and I’m glad to be able to continue this research with the district nursing team.

“We’re helping to investigate if SNAP helps people manage other long-term conditions, working with the UEA team interviewing patients and staff about their experiences of SNAP. I’m really grateful to the Windsor Research Unit for their support, as well as my nursing colleague Maria Martin, sharing her knowledge and experience from the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration East of England Fellowship to help the team successfully apply for the research grant!”

Following the trial, the team applied for a licence to continue using SNAP in their respiratory care service and are working with UEA to share their experience and educate other health teams.

Find out more about SNAP and current research projects at: https://thesnap.org.uk/