Community intravenous administration service (CIVAS)

Our community nursing team provides intravenous therapy for housebound patients in their own homes or in a community clinic, as an alternative to an extended stay in hospital.

We work with hospital based clinical nurses, infectious disease consultants, microbiologists and specialist pharmacists to provide a multidisciplinary approach.

We facilitate early hospital discharge for patients who are medically fit but require an extended course of intravenous antibiotic therapy. This approach allows us to most effectively use hospital and community healthcare resources, whilst moving away from historical over-reliance of acute hospital care, and reducing the risk of hospital acquired infections. Our overall aim is to improve patient experience, choice, wellbeing and quality of life.

We are not an out of hours service. If you require non-emergency out of hours assistance please contact call NHS 111.

What we provide

• Intravenous administration therapies, twice a day.
• Antimicrobials via a 24 hour ambulatory pump infusion.
• Intravenous diuretic therapy pathway
• Respiratory admission avoidance pathway
• Insertion and maintenance of venous access devices
• Provide high quality, safe, holistic nursing care

Who’s it for?

We help patients with:

• severe infections such as meningitis, endocarditis, urology infections
• failure of oral therapy like cellulitis
• deep seated infection such as abscess
• nil by mouth (unable to eat or drink)
• no oral alternative, some multi-drug resistant infections
• diuretic therapy (heart failure patients)
• diabetic foot patients

Referrals

We accept referrals from the Outpatient Antimicrobial Therapy team (OPAT), Cardiac teams, Homeward Matrons and Endocrine team at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT).