Diabetes Assistant Practitioner

at  North Bristol NHS Trust

This is a very rare and exciting opportunity for a caring and motivated band 4 Assistant Practitioner/ Nurse Associate who is looking to specialise and make a difference to people with diabetes to join our dedicated, friendly, and supportive specialist multi-disciplinary team. If you would like to embrace the challenge of developing new and specialist skills within a vast and rapidly evolving service, we would like to hear from you!
The key responsibilities of the role will be to assist the Diabetes Specialist Nurses (DSNs) to educate and empower people with diabetes to self-manage their condition within our inpatient and outpatient services. This will include teaching new skills and enhancing existing knowledge such as insulin administration, monitoring, diabetes technology, and safety advice. You will also support the DSNs to overcome barriers which may prevent this.
Additional duties include supporting the DSNs to promote our governance agenda, educating other healthcare professionals, audit activity and liaising with pharmaceutical representatives to ensure adequate supplies of equipment and team education. Please see the job description for a full list of roles and responsibilities.
Our patient cohort is frequently complex, so you will need excellent communication skills and be able to adapt your approach to provide high quality individualised care. You will be extremely sensitive to the challenges experienced by people with diabetes and have a genuine passion for the specialty. The success of our service and patient experience relies upon our extremely strong team ethic, so the successful candidate must share our team values.
The DSNs will support the post holder to achieve role specific competencies and upon completion you will be expected to work with indirect supervision and within agreed boundaries of practice.

Our vision at NBT is that by enabling our teams to be the best they can be we will provide exceptional healthcare, personally delivered. Our values represent the way we do things and what we stand for. By embedding these shared values in everything with do, we aim to create positive experiences for patients and staff. Our Trust is a great choice for people who want to develop their career in an environment that delivers high quality care.

• Assess patient ability to self-manage diabetes and recognise when this may not be possible, and take remedial action/ escalation
• Support, educate, and empower people with diabetes to achieve self-management where possible - this may include insulin administration, blood glucose and ketone monitoring, hypoglycaemia management, steroid education, and use of diabetes technologies such as continuous glucose monitoring, and supporting DSNs to run insulin pump starts
• Delivers health promotion advice to people with diabetes under the care of the NBT diabetes service
• Works in teams, collaborating effectively with a range of colleagues
• Promotes effective communication with patients (often with complex needs), relatives, the MDT and deals with enquiries in a professional manner
• Liaises with Primary and Secondary care colleagues to promote the safe handover of patient care plans. This will include informing primary care of diabetes equipment needs and requesting appropriate follow up with the relevant service if required
• Actively contributes to service development and delivers high standard of care in accordance with national and local guidelines
• Works independently under the guidance of the DSNs, acknowledging own skills and boundaries, taking opportunities to develop self-knowledge, contributing to effective teamwork, and responding to the changing needs of the service.
• Supports the team to conduct clinical audit and contributes to the implementation of quality improvement strategies
• Checks stock levels of equipment required by the DSNs and orders as appropriate
• Liaises with pharmaceutical representatives to arrange team education/ updates on new equipment/ drug therapy
• Delivers standardised education packages in a variety of scenarios to patients and other health care professionals
• Supports DSNs with telephone advice line where appropriate and within the boundaries of competence
• Improves the safety of individuals by identifying risks to safety or experience of care and takes appropriate action, putting the best interests, needs and preferences of people first
• Keep complete, clear, accurate and timely records
• Takes responsibility for ongoing professional development and ensuring the achievement of up-to-date mandatory training
• Provides, promotes and advocates for non-discriminatory, person-centred, and sensitive care at all times, which reflects patient values and beliefs, diverse backgrounds, cultural characteristics, language requirements, needs and preferences and will take account of any need for adjustment

Please refer the Job description for details