Our Hub Heroes

29 January 2025

You will have heard of our community palliative care team, but underpinning this vital service are the unsung heroes of our Hospice Hub team.

Maria, a Specialist Nurse and Hub Team Coordinator who has worked at Sobell House for four years, shares more…

The Hub team provides support and advice to patients and their families, as well as GPs, district nurses, and other health and care professionals. Our job is to help coordinate a patient’s care to ensure they receive the best possible support, and give them practical help with distressing symptoms, such as pain, nausea, breathlessness, and constipation.

Each day starts with a check in meeting with the clinical teams covering the inpatient, hospital, and community services. This enables us to check the capacity each area has for the day and which beds are available. We discuss any patients who won’t be admitted as an inpatient, and how we plan to support them over the next 24 hours. Following this, we have a Hospice Outreach meeting to discuss the patients that are symptomatically unstable and require a daily review either by phone or through a home visit.

Within the Hospice Outreach team we have occupational therapists, physios, specialist nurses, a specialist registrar, and a consultant. This enables us to provide a holistic review of the patient to meet their needs more effectively and quickly.

Calls come into the Hub and are answered by our amazing coordinators, who log the call on the digital message board for the three Hub nurses to respond to. We receive about 40 calls, 50 emails, and 2-3 urgent referrals every day.

The calls we deal with are varied, and can take anything from 5 to 60 minutes – it’s important to us to give people as much time as they need. We strongly encourage patients to contact us if they have worsening symptoms or need support, and this offer extends to carers and families who may have concerns; we appreciate how frightening it can feel to be alone at home for the patient or their loved ones caring for them.

Recently, I spoke with a patient who had been urgently referred to us for pain management. We discussed how they were managing currently and what their biggest concerns were. Following my assessment, I was able to advise on how to take medication to ensure the optimum pain relief is given. Due to the impact of the pain on their everyday life, I then arranged for them to be admitted to the Hospice Outreach service, so that they would be visited tomorrow and reviewed daily until their pain was under control.

No two days are ever the same in the Hub, but knowing that we can be there to support people when they are struggling the most is both very humbling and rewarding. A patient’s daughter who was finding it hard to cope as her mum came to the end of her life contacted us, and, following her mum’s death, said to me: “I would like to thank you personally for all your help last Thursday. You were amazing, and really pulled out all the stops”.

Between April 2023 and March 2024…

  • 2,766 home visits were made by our teams.
  • 39,398 calls were made from the Hub to provide people with support, care, and advice.
  • 12,793 telephone calls were received into the Hub from patients, carers, and healthcare professionals.