Love Your Lungs Week: celebrating the staff who look after our lungs
Love Your Lungs Week takes place from the 21 to the 27 June. The aim of the week is to raise awareness about lung health, what can be done to keep them as healthy as possible, and how we can avoid damaging them.
Respiratory services across each of our divisions and boroughs in CLCH support our communities with lung conditions, helping to keep them as healthy as possible, whether this be at home or in clinics. These services continue to innovate to bring more effective care to our communities.
In Hertfordshire, West Herts Community Respiratory Service has been working with a diverse team of clinicians, managers, and patient representatives to deliver even more personalised and effective care to patients with lung conditions. Efforts in developing more robust standards in this service helped them achieve a significant milestone, securing re-accreditation from the Royal College of Physicians for its Pulmonary Rehabilitation Service in its annual review.
Louise Holt, Physiotherapist Lead, West Herts Pulmonary Rehabilitation Service said:
“I feel incredibly proud to be a part of this dynamic and inspiring team which offers quality assured care, recognised by the RCP".
The Virtual Hospital, run by West Hertfordshire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (WHTH) and Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust (CLCH) which launched in 2020, has evolved to offer chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) virtual wards, helping to bring respiratory care closer to home.
Meanwhile, 'CLCH’s Post Covid Service in Tri-borough' has been shortlisted for a HSJ Patient Safety Award for the Post Covid Animation Project this year. The project helps to tackle health inequalities in accessing services for post-covid patients across the tri-borough area.
The team worked collaboratively with various organisations, GPs and charities to gain an insight into the barriers in access to services among those living in the most deprived areas. Key barriers identified were that members of the community were not able to understand what Long Covid was due to language barriers. The video for patients can be viewed Youtube.
Alongside our respiratory services our staff also support communities to show their lungs some love by guiding them on how improve the air they breathe in. Whilst it’s difficult to do much about the air outside, there are small changes that can be made to improve the air breathed in homes, and our staff continue to ‘make every contact count’ (MECC) by providing guidance to communities in their own homes.
Staff in our North Central Division (Barnet) brought together useful guidance cards about how to reduce mould, for all CLCH staff and patients, developed from NICE (National Institute for Healthcare Excellence) information and the experience and knowledge of our CLCH clinicians.
