New Nursing and Midwifery Strategy

Nurses are the corner stone of the health service, they provide round the clock care in a compassionate, dignified and respectful way to service users, their families and the wider community. This is the ethos of a recently launched Nursing and Midwifery Strategy for the Northern Trust.

Quest for Excellence – Our Promises, Nursing and Midwifery Strategy 2013-2016′, is a one page document which focuses on five key areas: providing support to service users, carers and families, supporting our staff to care, developing skills to care, valuing the nursing and midwifery contribution to care and strengthening leadership. It will be displayed in all wards and treatment rooms in the Trust.

Olive Macleod, Director of Nursing and User Experience explained, “All nurses, midwives and nursing auxiliaries working for us, contribute to the quality of care our patients receive on a daily basis. We have spent time talking to our staff and listening to what they think our priorities should be. They have identified the values and principles that are important in their practice and these values and principles are the core messages in our strategy.

“We also wanted to develop a live document with real meaning for nurses and midwives and we challenged ourselves to get all the key messages onto one page”.

To make this strategy live each Nursing and Midwifery team will identify areas for focus in the next 12 months. These improvements will be monitored by the Director of Nursing and User Experience and the Corporate Nursing Team.

21st October 2013