An end-of-life nurse consultant has told MLAs she hopes an initiative to make it easier to prescribe medicine to people in their own homes that was pioneered at the Foyle Hospice can be rolled out successfully across the North.

Sally Convery, a palliative care nurse consultant in the Public Health Agency (PHA), recently briefed MLAs on the pathfinder project which enables specialist palliative care doctors and nurses to directly prescribe, which is then supplied via local community pharmacies.

During a briefing of the Stormont Health Committee Ms. Convery advised that an issue had been identified with prescribing generally where hospice colleagues were unable to easily access medicines for their patients.

“The person would maybe see the patient in their home, but they did not actually have the prescription pad there and there was no process for them to use their prescribing qualification. That patient could be in Omagh, and the doctor who is on duty at the time could be in Altnagelvin.

"There is travelling distance, as you can imagine, between the decision to change that prescription and that prescription being written,” she said.

The PHA worked with the Foyle Hospice and primary care partners to put a new process in place, said Ms. Convery.

Previously specialist palliative care doctors and nurses operating within Foyle Hospice needed to contact the patient’s GP to ask them to prescribe medicines on their behalf.

But now hospice prescribers participating in the pathfinder can directly write prescriptions.

“We had a celebration event in Foyle Hospice...at which we presented the findings. That has shown us that we have significantly reduced the time between the decision to prescribe and the patient receiving the medication in their home.

"It was a small-scale study, but our next steps and our next meeting will be to look at how to scale and spread that across Northern Ireland in order to have a bigger impact. Those are the types of project that I have led on since coming into post. There are other things, but I will not go into the detail now,” she said.

Diane Walker, a Palliative Care in Partnership (PCiP) programme manager at the strategic planning and performance group (SPPG), told the committee how other advances in the west were to be introduced elsewhere.

"Through celebrating local innovation and showcasing good practice, the programme has supported the scale and spread of initiatives, such as just-in-case boxes, which were pioneered in the Western Health and Social Care Trust.

"They have now been adopted across the Southern Health and Social Care Trust and are progressed in the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and the South Eastern South Eastern Trust,” she said.

‘Just-in-case boxes’ are local, small supplies of injectable medications for patients, allowing them to receive timely care for symptom management at home.

At the recent launch of the new pathfinder at Foyle Hospice it was confirmed that a recommendation was to be made to incrementally adopt it into standard practice by all Hospice settings throughout the North.