Spotlight on a Service: Children’s Community Nursing Service | Talking #TeamCWPT blog

A unique insight into one of our key services

We spoke to our Children's Community Nursing Service to find out more about the service they offer children and young people across the Coventry and Warwickshire area.

Over the last 24 years, CWPT's Community Children's Nursing Service has worked closely with families to provide planned care to our young people. They hold close links with acute hospitals and work alongside health visiting teams, Public Health Nursing, GP practices and our Children Looked After Teams in order to provide a modern and innovative care program that promotes care within a community setting. The team's goal is to simply provide a gold standard service with the best possible care for our young people in their own homes.

The team offers a range of services, and the is divided into the follow sub services:

• The Birches Respite Unit and Children's Continuing Care Team
• Special Schools Nursing Service
• Children's Play Specialist
• Clinical Education Team
• Specialist Children's Palliative Care
• Specialist Children's Epilepsy
• Specialist Children's Respiratory
• Children's Community Nursing Team
• Children's Bladder and Bowel Service - new in 2024

The Children's Bowel and Bladder Service launched in April 2024 and supports children and young people with constipation, soiling, and daytime and nighttime wetting.

The Children's Community Nursing Service offers a passionate and high quality care program that puts its young people at the heart of our work. We have children and families involved with recruitment, our stakeholders engaged and our multi-disciplinary teams all input into the care we strive to provide. We are working hard to ensure that the care we offer is mapped against the NHSE agenda to provide care closer to home, and we work closely with our team of clinical education staff to be able to plan and implement individualised care for our complex young caseload and their families.

What do our staff say about us?

Children's nursing allows you to remember the child within you. It's about holding hands and healing hearts and it's about getting your heart broken. It can be hard, but it's amazing and rewarding.

- Michelle, Special School Nurse

We work with families in their darkest and most vulnerable times, and they let us into their lives in a unique way. When a child is ill, any parent would swap places with them in an instant, and the trust they put in us to care for them in the myriad of ways we do is huge. This is a daunting prospect, but when we get it right, the therapeutic relationships we build are so rewarding.

- Hannah, Community Children's Nurse

Being a children's carer is a very special and rewarding job. We make their respite stay a happy and enjoyable time. When the children are belly laughing at you and having the best time, you know in that moment that you are making a positive change in their lives.

- Suman, Children's Carer, Birches Respite Team.