Flying with Lisa Basi

Lisa Basi, CNWL’s Head of Integrated Primary Care Camden (which covers District Nursing, Community Therapy, Rapid Response) has written to all staff about the work of the last few weeks,  which we are publishing here for people to see the great work underway for the most vulnerable people.

I wanted to give you all a personal message from me to say “Well done!!!”

You have all been amazing, so dedicated and great to work with.

There has been loads of great feedback and most of all ‘thank yous’ from care home residents, staff, housebound patients and their carers; I wish that I could capture the patient & carer comments and appreciation when I meet with them one to one to give the vaccination, to share with each and every member of the team; the amazing and hardworking team who have continued working for long hours to set up the Care Home vaccinations and complete 688 vaccinations in care homes in less than a month.

The roll out of the Housebound vaccinations yesterday (20 Jan)  has been great progress. I would like to particularly recognise the HATs Transport team and the knowledge and skill of the drivers to enable us to ‘fly’ around Camden so quickly for the nurses to do 11 visits / vaccines per day.  With more to do of course.

For those who are not aware; we need to give 11 doses of vaccine per one vial of Astra Zeneca within 6 hours before it expires and keep it carefully at the right temperature with minimal movement; that means 11 visits / vaccines in 6 hours! We would not achieve this if we did not have the excellent communication and organisational skills in the Admin team to gain the details we need plus the HATs transport drivers to get us around on the fastest route and deal with the inevitable contingencies on the way.

I had an invite to the Camden GP Engagement Event yesterday chaired by Dr Neel Gupta. The entire group wanted to tell you all how much they appreciate your “phenomenal work to vaccinate; your professionalism, high standards of care and communication”. The Camden GPs and Primary Care Network Leads have enjoyed working with the teams from CNWL; and our incredible achievement which was recognised by Neel to say that “Camden is leading the way for community and Care Home vaccinating in London”  Neel acknowledged the challenges and complexities of delivering such a complex programme in a challenging community setting was “indeed incredible”.

Simon Wheatley  (Assistant Director for Primary & Community Commissioning for Camden) has been closely following our progress and I loved his description of how we had delivered the vaccination model; during the GP engagement event Simon described our work “like we were on a journey in a plane and in order to fly there we were making the plane in the air as we went!”

I attended the meeting on my laptop on MSTeams in the transport as I was returning to the PCN base at Bloomsbury after my eleventh Housebound patient vaccination visit yesterday; this gave me a great segue at the end of the meeting to say that I was currently flying that plane!! When we are finished hopefully we will all be able to fly somewhere fabulous for a well-earned rest!!

Thank you to you all and I look forward to a time where the restrictions begin to ease and the pandemic subsides so we can all enjoy our freedom. This is a rapidly moving development; please let me know if there is anything I can do to support or any ideas we can develop to continue to ‘build our plane!’