A nurse-led cancer clinic helping patients manage symptoms and side-effects from their treatments is increasingly lightening the workload of Peninsula Health’s Emergency Department and oncologists.
“It’s not just chemotherapy now, there are so many different things – targeted therapies, immunotherapy, and they all have side effects,” says Nurse Practitioner Lisa Taylor-Lovett, who founded the clinic back in 2020.
Lisa explains that prior to the Symptom & Urgent Review Clinic (SURC) being established, patients would often arrive for treatment acutely unwell – many wouldn’t contact the service with their concerns, expecting it’s “normal” to have severe symptoms.
“In the first six months we showed a 40% decrease of people presenting to ED,” Lisa explains. “And about 28% of the people who presented to ED were discharged from ED.”
Lisa runs the clinic along with fellow Nurse Practitioner Sophie Robson, and five dedicated cancer nurses. Patients who attend the clinic with severe side-effects may avoid a hospital visit altogether.
“The benefit is that if we get somebody in and we can fix up things – like give them fluids, make them feel better, send them home – it’s taking the numbers away from ED,” Lisa explains. “And also they’re seeing someone who understands what the symptoms are from.”
If a patient is very unwell and still needs to be admitted, the clinic works closely with the patient services manager and can directly admit them from the SURC.
“We do all the management side of things – like whether they need bloods, or cannula, or fluids, or scans, and then they just go straight upstairs,” says Lisa.
Lisa says that the clinic model has become engrained quickly, and in addition to the reduced number of ED presentations, there have also been fewer acutely unwell people showing up for their regular treatments.
“They’d come in for their treatment and they’d be awful, and then I’d have to admit them from the chair… We hardly see that at all now.”