Community of Practice member
2022 session dates:
The curriculum, topics and focus for the year will be set during the first session in January.
Last year’s topics included:
This annual subscription will be of interest to nurse and pharmacist independent prescribers working in palliative care.
Our tutors:
Nigel works with the community nursing team at St Christopher’s; working alongside a consultant physician and two clinical team leads, in leading a large community palliative care team who work in the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark Lewisham, and Croydon. He has almost 30 years of nursing experience in HIV/AIDS, community nursing, cancer nursing, and palliative care. Nigel’s palliative care experience has been gained across community and acute hospital settings in London. He originally worked at St Christopher’s in 1999, returned in 2008, and then again in 2016.
At St Christopher’s, Nigel also leads work around non-medical prescribing, user and patient reported outcome measures, and developing new nursing roles to support career development. He has also worked overseas in Botswana on an HIV/AIDS programme, and with the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund in Uganda and Tanzania. Nigel is a registered nurse, and also holds post-registration qualifications in public health nursing, teaching, and non-medical prescribing. Nigel has an MSc in Medical Anthropology, and also an MSc in Healthcare Research (Palliative Care).
Maaike graduated from the KATHO (Roeselare, Belgium) in 2002 as a general and mental health nurse. She started her professional career working on mental health A&E units in Belgium and then moved to Aruba (Caribbean) where she worked on a mental health A&E unit and the local prison. After working there for 3 years she moved back to Belgium and continued working in A&E and Nursing Homes.
Maaike moved to the UK in 2006 and has since worked in Nursing Homes and Greenwich & Bexley Community Hospice where she developed a palliative care service for care homes and then also developed and established an education department. Maaike has experience of working in palliative care, mental health, dementia, prison, care homes and education and has completed various post graduate education including a PGCert in Higher Education and a MA in Education.
Maaike has previously been seconded to the University of Greenwich as a senior lecturer and now works for St Christopher’s Hospice as Senior Educationalist where she alongside her senior leadership role leads on curriculum development and delivery.
Andrea graduated from UCL – Institute of Education as a Primary school teacher in 1996. She has worked in a range of schools (in the UK and Spain) as class teacher; curriculum coordinator; department and a senior leader for over twenty years. Andrea has been a local authority advisory teacher in Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston and Lambeth. She is experienced in supporting adults to deliver best practice and assisting educational settings (with poor Ofsted ratings) to raise standards.
Andrea worked as a tutor and lecturer for primary initial teacher trainees at UCL – Institute of Education from 2016 – 2021. The role involved supporting teaching practice through observation, formative assessment and awarding qualified teacher status. Andrea supported academic progress by planning and delivering teaching sessions and marking assignments.
Andrea has been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) since 2018. Fellowship is awarded to professionals who meet the criteria of the UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) for teaching and supporting adult learning (in higher education). She has excellent understanding of effective approaches to learning and teaching support, as a key contribution to high quality adult learning.
She now works for St Christopher’s Hospice as Virtual Communities Lead where she facilitates learning virtual and face-to-face learning experiences for a range of learners.
This annual membership programme provides a monthly online community of practice supporting Nurses and Allied Health Care Professionals who are non-medical prescribers working in palliative and end of life care. The community provides members with a space for reflection, discussion and sharing of best practice.
This year we have chosen a new format of delivery ensuring we maximise opportunities for people to learn together as a community during live sessions. The community will meet 6 times per year (alternate months). In between the live sessions ongoing learning, reflection and critical thinking will also be facilitated through on demand resources, activities and forum discussions.
The sessions, covering all the key end of life prescribing issues, include a 20-30 minute presentation led by a clinical expert, followed by two case study presentations from members of the community, and time for discussion and Q&A.
Members of the community can access the presentations on our Online Learning Platform (OLP). The OLP will also be home to documents, reference materials and the case studies discussed in the sessions.
If you have any questions about this or any of our other courses, please contact the Education team who will be happy to help
At St Christopher's, a registered charity, it is important for us to maximise any surpluses to reinvest in the objectives of the charity.
Unfortunately, the manner in which we undertake our training currently means we are not able to invest as much of our surplus as possible, therefore from the 1 December 2017, St Christopher’s Education Centre will charge VAT at the standard rate on our training courses, the reason for this change in pricing is twofold:
i) We want to be able to reinvest any surpluses made from training back into all of our charitable objectives rather than only Education
ii) We want to be able to reclaim the VAT on costs relating to developing and running the training courses