Championing best practice in vascular access – new Clinical Nurse Educator joins Vygon UK
100% of NHS staff agreed Vygon’s RCN-accredited course boosted confidence in caring for patients with midlines or PICCs
A commitment to best practice and education around vascular access has seen Vygon UK welcome a new Clinical Nurse Educator, who will apply her frontline NHS experience to delivering training to NHS staff.
Here at Vygon UK, we welcome to the team Jon-En Yeung to our Intravascular Therapies (IVT) team, working alongside Clinical Nurse Educator Tracey Jones.
Together, they will lead a comprehensive education program of courses in-person and online to NHS customers who use Vygon’s vascular access products. This training aims to ensure that staff in hospitals UK-wide understand in detail how to use the devices to deliver the best possible patient outcomes.
Jon-En worked as a nurse for the last nine years at London hospitals including Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Trust, and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. During her nursing career Jon-En has worked in a wide range of specialisms including stroke rehab; ear, nose and throat; surgery; intensive care; and general medicine.
She also gained key experience relevant to her new role when she worked in vascular access at University College Hospital, during which time she regarded Vygon devices as the best. “They were my product of choice when I was in clinical areas,” she said.
She believes it is vital for nurses and other medical staff to always stay up to date with the latest developments. She said: “It’s important for them to be upskilled. Changes in practice, new equipment, new technology – if they don’t learn about it, they don’t know and then they’re not providing the best care for that patient.
Jon-En and Tracey agree that the level of skill, education and support regarding vascular access in hospitals around the country is very varied and added - “But that’s why we’re here, to educate them in these skills,” said Jon-En.
Jon-En and Tracey have quickly forged a strong working relationship and together visit hospitals, training a wide variety of medical staff incorporating theory and practical elements in the sessions. The learning is then cascaded by those staff to others in the hospital.
Tracey said: “We’re very interactive with our practical and our theory training, and it’s not generally just one session.
“Sometimes we receive an email from someone we have trained two months before and they want an answer to a clinical query, or they want us to come back and explain something else, or train them in another device, so it’s very much ongoing support.”
Jon-En will continue regular nursing shifts at University College Hospital while working in her new role at Vygon. This will allow her to fulfil the hours of clinical practice required to keep up her nursing registration with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). She also feels that it is essential to continue to provide care in a hospital setting so that she fully understands the challenges when she is delivering the training.
“How am I supposed to teach people what is best practice and how to use these products if I don’t know what it is like in that environment myself?” she said. “It would be hypocritical to be educating people in this area without having current experience in the field.”
E-learning from Vygon
Vygon’s e-learning provision includes a course for midline and extended dwell catheter insertion that has been re-accredited by the Royal College of Nursing. The course is free to access for Vygon customers and awards five Continuing Professional Development (CPD) hours on completion.
The company’s online courses have been well received, with a recent survey showing that almost nine in ten (86%) strongly agreed that the e-learning experience will be useful at work. Every single respondent agreed or strongly agreed that they felt more confident about caring for patients with midlines or PICCs following the training course, and 89% strongly agreed that the content in the theoretical module was relevant and clearly explained.
In the research, the online training was described as “extremely rewarding,” “the best training package I have completed,” and “an excellent resource…co-ordinated by knowledgeable staff”.
To find out more, visit our Intravascular Therapies Hub