Staff Nurse - Discharge Lounge

The discharge lounges at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells are undergoing changes and expansion to the current service provided to the trust and moving to providing a 7-day service - with no night shifts. Whether your newly qualified or have years of experience this maybe just what you're looking for.

Are you able to navigate around IT systems, work well under pressure or like the feeling of not knowing what the working day has in store? This is an exciting time to be joining our MTW family as we move forwards and transition into a fully digitally led organisation.

The lounges can offer you challenging and changing demands to support the flow of the hospital through the both the emergency and elective pathways, while trying to keep the flow moving through the lounge.

The lounge continues all patient care from the wards including drug rounds via out IT systems and support creating capacity by giving last doses of IV medications such as antibiotics prior to discharge. The lounge staff also support ward team in completing simple district nurse referrals for patient, providing patient education around discharge medications and teaching injection techniques if required. With the expansion of the virtual wards the lounge staff will support patients with hospital in a box and use of the app and uploading data prior to discharge.

Main duties of the job

Building relationships with our inpatient area teams, medical and surgical teams and external providers help ensure patients leave safely from the discharge lounges. Therefore, engagement and effective communication is a key skill for promoting positive patient outcomes.

Communication under pressure will be vital, ensuring that other allied healthcare professional are supporting their part in the patients discharge to minimise delays and extended waits in the lounge. Preventing delays for those patients who require an acute admission. Quick thinking and the ability to think outside of the box will also be a vital skill to have and or develop due to the pace and demand on the discharge lounge

The lounges work alongside our Care Coordination Centre (CCC), Site Directors and Site Practitioners to ensure a safe and effective flow. Our in-patients are monitored via our Teletracking system in the CCC to see identified confirmed discharges or pending discharge for later on in the day. This system runs live time so is able to monitor the current and predicted bed base and census at any one time.

The discharge lounge helps support patients get to the right area first time while also ensuring that we are embedding a positive patient experience within MTW.

Would you like to work flexibly? In the NHS, we are reminded every day of how important life is. As a flexible working friendly organisation, we want to be sure that you can work in a way that is best for us, for our patients and for you. Speak to us about how we might be able to accommodate a flexible working arrangement.

MTW is a large acute hospital trust in the south-east of England.

We provide a full range of general hospital services and some aspects of specialist and complex care to around 600,000 people living in west Kent and East Sussex. We have a team of over 8,000 full and part-time staff. We also provide specialist cancer services to around 2 million people across Kent and East Sussex via the Kent Oncology Centre.

In the 2024 NHS staff survey, our employees ranked MTW among the top 10 NHS Trusts nationwide and the second-best Trust to work for in the South East.