Celebrating Home Parenteral Nutrition Week
August 4-10 is Home Parenteral Nutrition (HPN) Week, a time meant to bring awareness to those who are living at home with parenteral nutrition and to help bring understanding to some of the challenges that those receiving HPN experience.
HPN at PHS
The PHS team is dedicated to providing the highest level of care in home parenteral nutrition. This includes everything from the assessments and planning done by the dietitians and the compounding in our infusion pharmacy to lab draws and log sheets completed by a nurse to ensure proper progress and tracking. Weekly, pharmacists, dietitians, HCN staff, infusion nurses and providers meet to review each HPN patient’s status and bringing in an inter-disciplinary aspect to each patient and the care they receive.
With the goal of weaning a patient off parenteral feedings and onto enteral when it’s an option, this multi-faceted team manages an intricate timeline to keep HPN accurate, safe and delivered to the home where children can live their lives without interruption. See JoeVon’s story of how he thrives as he works with PHS staff to wean off TPN – his smile is contagious!
Tracking with Sustain
In an effort to improve patient outcomes, PHS is involved in the Sustain National Patient Registry for Nutrition Care, a “comprehensive, web-based tool that allows clinicians to enter patient data, measure and analyze results, benchmark outcomes against the aggregate data, and publish findings.”
This system allows PHS to benchmark patient data against national averages and contribute to the development and better understanding on parenteral nutrition, while also demonstrating the high level of safety and complete care available for children in the home. “It allows us to collect data that we can use moving forward in creating the very best care plan for each child,” said Judy Giel, our Senior Vice President of Clinical Services. PHS dietitians submit data quarterly, with results coming back benchmarked against national data.
The Oley Foundation
Oley is dedicated to spreading the word about HPN this week, and has created several tools to help others do the same. From Awareness Week buttons and sample press releases to conversation starters, everything is available on their website. Are you using HPN? Send them a photo of yourself for their ‘Living with HPN’ awareness video. Here is last year’s video, proving just how much HPN can allow for a life full of activity and adventure.