The Children’s Community Nursing team

Our service aims to enable smooth transition from home to hospital and hospital to home, working to provide support, advice, knowledge and skills to empower patients and their parents or carers.

The team works closely with other professionals to ensure the needs of our children and families are met. Our play worker and other team members work with children who have life-limiting or life-threatening conditions and their families.

Children are referred to our care from hospital, their GP or child development centres for the following reasons:

• Central line bloods and care
• At home chemotherapy
• Administration of IV antibiotics (CIVAS service)
• Wound care including post operative wound care
• Support with care of enteral feeding devices, for example, re-passing NG tubes or care of gastrostomies.
• Care of pre-term infants, for example, oxygen dependent.
• End of life care
• And much more.

How we work

• We are a non‑emergency service.
• Our team works 365 days a year, providing essential visits only.
• On weekends, we operate a skeletal service, meaning we can only deliver essential care.
• This may mean that less essential visits will sometimes need to be rearranged to ensure that urgent and essential care is prioritised.

Important: If your child requires emergency care, please call 999 or attend your nearest Accident & Emergency (A&E) department. For urgent but non‑emergency advice, you can also call NHS 111.

Contacting us

• When you call you will speak to a member of our admin team, who will then send a message to our nurses.
• A nurse or clinical co-ordinator will then triage your message.
• If the matter is clinically essential, we will respond within one working day.
• If the matter is not clinically essential, a member of the clinical team will aim to reply within 72 hours.
• For routine calls that are not clinically essential, we will aim to respond within 72 hours.
• Please note: we will repeat the contact number you provide to ensure accuracy.
• We are aiming to work digitally where possible, so may ask you to email photos to us, rather than having a home visit.

Visits and assessments

• We carry out annual assessments for all children under our care.
• Sometimes these assessments are completed electronically. In these cases, parents may receive an e‑questionnaire by SMS message to complete.
• When we book visits with families, we will provide you with an approximate time of our visit and will aim to be with you within two‑hours of the time for arrival. This allows us to always prioritise essential visits.

What we ask families

• Be available during the scheduled two‑hour visit window.
• Share any updates about your child’s health or circumstances.
• Understand that our service prioritises clinical need and may not always be able to respond immediately.
• Rearrange visits promptly if you are unable to attend.

What we offer

We offer nursing care at home for children who meet our referral criteria including:

• central line bloods and central line care
• at home chemotherapy
• administration of IV antibiotics (CIVAS service)
• wound care including post operative wound care
• support with care of enteral feeding devices, for example, re-passing NG tubes or care of gastrostomies.
• care of pre-term infants, for example, oxygen dependent.
• end of life care
• training for parents, childminders and education staff.
• care of children with metabolic conditions

Who is it for

We accept referrals for children who have a nursing need from newborn to the child’s 19^th birthday.

Referral information

We accept referrals from healthcare professionals only, including hospital wards and GPs. We do not accept self-referrals.