The NIVAS Website is undergoing essential maintenance, please bear with us as we complete this process.
You can still join NIVAS by clicking here.
Thank you to all those who attended the 12th Annual Conference in Manchester on Thursday 6th & Friday 7th June 2024.
The presentations are now available, you will need to use your login details to view the page.
Congratulations to Jane Hodson, in recognition of her long term dedication and commitment to patients requiring vascular access, whilst making a huge contribution to the field of vascular access and IV therapy.
Vascular access is a specialised field of clinical care that is being carried out in an expanding range of inpatient and community locations. The Vascular Access Nurse of the Year award will recognise the achievements of vascular access nurses who have been responsible for progress, continued professional development and improved patient care within vascular access.
For this category, please consider:
What has this nurse contributed to vascular access nursing?
How has this contribution impacted patient care?
How can this contribution benefit vascular access nursing as a whole?
What evidence (if any ) is there to support this contribution?
Nominating someone for a BJN Award is a great way to celebrate those who have gone above and beyond to deliver excellence in care. Submit your entry before the 8th of November 2024 by visiting our website: www.bjnawards.co.uk
Please follow this link to download the NIVAS infiltration and extravasation toolkit. This toolkit is intended to enable local services and healthcare organisations to implement polices, protocols and guidelines that will increase awareness about non-chemotherapy extravasations. The toolkit is a guide to help improve patient safety in IV therapy practice. There will a series of webinars in the coming months about the extravasations toolkit and how to implement it in your local organisation. There are also downloadable action cards and campaign posters to raise awareness about infiltration and extravasation which can be found here.
Please contact me for further information by email on andrew.barton@nhs.net
Andrew Barton, NIVAS Chair
Dear NIVAS Member,
I hope this message finds you and your services recovering well from the pandemic. I wanted to update you about some of the recent work NIVAS has been doing.
Before the pandemic NIVAS we starting to work on national guidelines for vascular access and IV therapy and the creation of a nationally accredited qualification for vascular access. I am very pleased to tell you the board has started working on these projects in earnest. We have completely mapped out the national guidelines and started to populate the data and evidence needed to produce these. These guidelines will form the basis of the content for the national vascular access qualification. This forms a 3 year plan to improve safety nationally in relation to IV therapy and vascular access practice.
NIVAS is still working hard to promote your interests nationally in relation to IV therapy and vascular access practice and will continue to do so. As you will know, procuring IV therapy and vascular access products has been a problem over the past few months with the most commonly used devices not being available via NHS supply chain. This shortage or devices such as cannula, venepuncture sets and 10ml saline ampules have made good practice in IV therapy and vascular access harder to maintain but not impossible thankfully. A couple of things to remember is that not all needle free connectors are Aurum glass syringe prefilled emergency drug compatible, NIVAS is still working with MHRA and NHS I/E. It important to be aware of issues like this because if your usually needle free connector becomes unavailable, care should be taken to replace it with a like for like product.
Take care everyone.
Kind Regards
Andrew Barton, NIVAS Chair
