For the past month, the Chronicle & Echo & Northants Telegraph has been working with organisations across the town and wider county to pull together a celebration of just some of the key workers and volunteers who have made a difference during lockdown.
Here we feature some of the staff at Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust who were nominated for The Big Thank You.
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Many of our Caf Vie staff are still working on our sites across the county to provide meals for our staff and inpatients.
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Adult Community Hospital Inpatient Beds team - Our three community hospitals provide inpatient specialist services for adult patients who require 24 hour in-patient care for sub-acute medicine and have a combination of medical, physical and neurological needs. The patients may have had an acute illness, their health may have deteriorated following a long-term condition; or they may require medical, physical or specialist rehabilitation. Some patients are admitted following a stroke or a brain injury and one of our units has dedicated beds for palliative care. All three community hospitals have continued treating and admitting patients during COVID-19. Picture taken pre-lockdown
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Adult Community Hospital Inpatient Beds team - Our three community hospitals provide inpatient specialist services for adult patients who require 24 hour in-patient care for sub-acute medicine and have a combination of medical, physical and neurological needs. The patients may have had an acute illness, their health may have deteriorated following a long-term condition; or they may require medical, physical or specialist rehabilitation. Some patients are admitted following a stroke or a brain injury and one of our units has dedicated beds for palliative care. All three community hospitals have continued treating and admitting patients during COVID-19. Picture taken pre-lockdown
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Infection Prevention and Control Team - This team helps staff, patients and visitors to NHFT to keep safe by ensuring we keep the risk of infection and contamination to a minimum. As well as providing a service to NHFT, we also offer advice and guidance to GP Practices and Nursing Homes within Northamptonshire and the commissioning element of Nene and Corby CCG's. As you can imagine, they have been and continue to be extremely busy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Picture taken pre-lockdown.
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Centre for Neuromodulation team - The team treat people with depression and other mental health conditions that are resistant to traditional treatments. The fab team is still treating patients from our state-of-the-art treatment centre.
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Diabetic and High Risk Foot Service - Over 80% of the patients seen by the DHRFS are classed as vulnerable due to diabetes and some are shielded for other underlying conditions. Therefore patients are unable to leave their homes due to Government advice. As patients with active diabetic foot disease can deteriorate very quickly without specialist monitoring of their foot condition, the Team needed to move quickly to a new model of delivering care. With the much-appreciated help of Information Technology and Information Governance at NHFT, and management support, the DHRFS have implemented telemedicine. Using mobile phones and webcams, podiatrists contact their patients who use their own mobile phone to give the podiatrist a real time image of their feet so they can decide a treatment plan. Using this method, one patient was recognised to have potentially limb-threatening infection and was admitted to hospital for minor surgery. Without this intervention there was the potential for a much longer admission and