Setting up a Nurse-Led Clinic (1)
Setting up a Nurse-Led Clinic (2)
Writing a Business Plan
Sept 2012: New article published: Duffin C (2012) ‘Overcoming the challenge of setting up a nurse-led clinic’. Primary Health Care 22(7): 8-9. A useful but short paper reviewing a recent conference and summarising the speakers advice on setting up a clinic.
Setting up a nurse-led clinic can be a challenging and rewarding experience. It’s wise to prepare a business plan/case or a proposal before the clinic begins. This helps you take an organised and clear look at the variety of factors that may be critical to the success of the clinic. In addition, some of these may need addressing before the service starts. This focus is also useful in creating clarity for future publicity and auditing.
The following areas are included in ‘Nurses-led Clinics: Practice Issues’ the little blue book published by Routledge and available in the bookstore on this site.
Introduction
No nurse-led clinic works in isolation.
How do the healthcare team feel about the service?
Will they support and help develop your service (and you)?
Will you have administrative support or end up doing all your own letters and reports?
Aim of the clinic
Can you set out the clinic aim(s) succinctly? ‘The aim of the nurse-led clinic is to…’ This will be useful in publicity, auditing and in explaining clearly to all interested parties what you’re aiming to do. Consider how the clinic will meet patient and service needs.
What are the criteria to access the clinic?
What patients will you see and not see? Do you need to put this in your publicity? How will you deal with inappropriate referrals, particularly if beyond your scope of practice, and who may need to see another healthcare professional urgently?
Publicity
How will you publicise the clinic?
Who will you meet and discuss the service with: notably those who may ultimately utilise or refer into it?
Do you need to prepare patient leaflets to ensure that the right patients access the service?
Have you put this into your business plan?
Professional development
How will you assess what your professional development needs are?
How are you going to plan to meet these?
Can you create your own on-going development portfolio by reflecting on your patient needs and breaking these into competencies?
Managing medicines/nurse prescribing
How will you address managing medicines in the clinic?
Is you inability to nurse prescribe likely to compromise the service?
Audit and evaluation
How will you measure effectiveness?
Are there areas that you are required to audit and therefore will need data collection from an early stage?
Finance
Do your business plan! The clip on here will help and there are a variety of texts on the bookstore page for Business Planning. Working out costings can be a headache and you will probably need help with this. Consider if there are other colleagues who have had to do this for their clinic who can help. Have a word with someone in the finance department of your institution if you can. You could leave a message on the message board on this site and see who replies.
Other resources:
Here are some further online resources that may help: Don’t worry about the specialism but consider the issues they faced and how these were overcome.
www.nursingtimes.net/nurse-led-clinics-10-essential-steps-to-setting-up-a-service/1931644.article
