Waiting times go from 8 months to 8 weeks with its ENT nurse led clinic
Nurse Practitioner led clinics are now being held throughout Cwm Taf University Health Board for ENT appointments. This is the first integrated primary and secondary care service of its kind and has proved a huge success with clinics seeing more than 4,500 patients to date. Waiting times for non urgent ENT cases have dropped from eight months to eight weeks.
The new nurse led service comprises of nurse practitioner Eluned Evans and primary care nurse Nicola Jenkins. The service provided has improved the efficiency of the service overall, as patients normally seen within consultant led clinics are now seen at the nurse led clinic. This means that patients with more complex or urgent ENT needs also get seen by the consultant quicker.
Eluned said: “It’s so important that people get the right care at the right time with no wasted clinic capacity. We want every patient’s appointment to be worthwhile.
“Part of our role is to work closely with the audiology team to help ensure patients are receiving optimum benefit of expensive digital hearing aids.
“Other non urgent ENT cases are assessed and treated within a much shorter period of time.
“It is my hope that more nurses will join our team to be able to extend the service which is so important to our patients”.
