Supporting the NHS – a Q&A with Kara Richards, Alcura nurse

Earlier this month we celebrated 75 years of the NHS. This prompted us to take a closer look at how we support our amazing National Health Service. In the first of a series of three interviews with Alliance Healthcare team members – we caught up with Kara Richards one of our Alcura nurses.

Alcura supports the NHS with both straightforward and complex patient needs through a comprehensive end-to-end service, to enable patients to receive care out of the hospital environment. 

Kara is the Operations Manager for the field team and manages the Alcura nursing team on a day-to-day basis. The team consists of 45 registered nurses who provide service to patients from NHS trusts across the whole of the UK.

As a registered nurse herself, Kara did her training at a hospital in Milton Keynes and has worked in various areas across the NHS covering all aspects of nursing in hospitals, the community, as well as the private sector supporting the NHS. She has always supported NHS patients and worked with the organisation to manage their care of patients by providing additional support and resources. 

When asked how she would sum up her experience of working with the NHS, Kara said:

“I started my career in the NHS and its where my true passion for nursing started. I think it's a fantastic organisation and I am very proud to have worked with them and of the support that we (Alcura) are able to offer them. Any help that we're able to give to support and work collaboratively within the NHS is just a positive thing. It would also be great to grow and innovate what we can offer to the NHS, the work that we do is very beneficial to our communities.”

Do you have one person you link to at the NHS or are you all inter linked?

“We deal directly with them and the clinical teams will have a contact escalation matrix if there are any issues they need to raise. I speak to the clinical nurse teams, the clinical home care pharmacists, consultants, and clinicians. We have review meetings for some of our services on a regular basis just to ensure that the service we're providing is suitable. We also work closely with our hospital account managers and the commercial and manufacturing account managers - communication between the two teams is important and done well.”

What was your experience of working and supporting the NHS during the pandemic?

“I worked in the field team as the pandemic started and we managed to continue all the services we provided pre-COVID without any disruption. The patients we cared for were very vulnerable, immunosuppressed and couldn’t go into clinics as they would do normally, so we played a vital role at that stage. Alcura nurses provided a continuous feedback link with the Trust, writing up detailed reviews of their patients, letting the NHS know if there were any clinical issues that needed escalating or raising. 

It wasn’t just about the physical giving of the medication but also the holistic, safeguarding, and mental health care too. It was a really difficult time for those in hospital as they were facing COVID head on, so we were able to really support those patients that were vulnerable in the community that may have not been monitored as closely. The support we got from the NHS and from the PPE suppliers meant that our nurses could continue working. I was told there was no delay in any treatment during that whole time frame. We just continued to follow NHS England guidelines and worked with the NCHA to ensure that our nurses stayed safe.”

How did you celebrate the milestone Birthday at Alliance Healthcare?

“We had tea and cake stations around the building as we joined in with the NHS Big Tea to celebrate. We also raised money for NHS charities and team members joined in with ‘wear it blue’ day.”