Amy Hall
Job description: Clinical nurse specialist, Health Inclusion Team at Guys and St Thomas' Community Services
Areas of interest: Housing and homelessness – services for women with complex needs, Domestic abuse, Families and children – including relationships, Substance use, Women involved in the criminal justice system, Mental health and wellbeing, Childhood trauma – including being in care or childhood abuse, Employment and skills, Improving support for women involved in prostitution
Amy Hall's Recent Activity
"A community nursing award was recently won for partnership work between the Health Inclusion Team and Sexual Health Outreach Team (both part of Guys and St Thomas' community services) and the work they have been doing at St Mungo's South London Women's hostel. This has involved putting on sexual health and contraception training for the staff and then running lunches every 6 -8 weeks for the last year to engage the women (after asking the women how they wanted sexual health and contraception advice). The lunches are in the hostel and are run as open access / drop-in sessions. Sexual health promotion and contraceptive advice has been given in this informal setting so that the women feel comfortable to ask any questions / feel they can trust the professionals involved. They have been able to have full sexual health screens and been offered to have any contraception initiated on site. 3 women have had the contraceptive implant inserted as a result of this and several have had full sexual health screens. It is felt that an increase in awareness amongst all residents has increased as a result.
The other work that the clinical nurse specialist from the Health Inclusion Team does involves looking after all the health of the women at the hostel- including any women who are pregnant. Full health screens are offered and the women are outreached regularly, despite this there have been 3 pregnancies this year (one of these was a women who came into the hostel already 4 months pregnant). These women have complex issues including street sex working, substance misuse problems and mental health issues- so linking them into the specialist midwifery teams and raising alerts with local hospitals in case the women present to give birth early is also carried out. This liaison has meant that the specialist midwifery service and the nurse have regular contact and can optimise their outreach with the women by not duplicating work. The aim of this is to try and give the women and the unborn child the best opportunity to stay healthy and ideally together."
Reply To: Children and families: improving support
