A day in the life of... Alison Pegrum, Practice Educator

Farleigh Hospice’s Education Team provides a comprehensive educational programme designed to support health and social care providers with the skills and knowledge to help deliver good end of life care for both patients and families.

Alison Pegrum, Practice Educator in our Education Team, tells us about her working day.

“Farleigh Hospice has been delivering palliative and end of life care in mid Essex for over 40 years. Our Education Team has developed a comprehensive learning programme to train our staff and volunteers. We also share our skills, knowledge and experience with other health and social care providers who work with patients with life-limiting conditions within the local community.

I work part-time as a Practice Educator in the Education Team. I am a registered nurse and, before moving to education, I worked in both Farleigh’s Inpatient Unit (IPU) and the Hospice at Home Team, which has proved to be valuable experience and preparation for this role.

We are a small team, so I vary my days to be as flexible as possible and to accommodate as many requests for support and education as I can - meaning my working days and weeks are never the same.

Farleigh is committed to excellent patient care and invests a lot of time in educating our staff and supporting them. We deliver the ‘Principles of Palliative Care’ course for all new clinical staff - which is based on a previous course which was run at university level – so everyone coming into this organisation has the same level of knowledge.

My day can be spent working alongside a healthcare assistant in our hospice at home team out in the community or with a registered nurse on IPU. I support the staff to develop their palliative care knowledge and skills, and work through their clinical competencies. Alternatively, I may be teaching our internal staff on the ‘Principles of Palliative Care’ course and the ‘Advanced Palliative Care’ course or teaching the Community nurses from Provide (the organisation that provides a range of community health services in conjunction with the NHS).

I could also be off site teaching end of life care to care agency staff, as part of an award-winning collaboration with Essex County Council, St Luke’s and St Francis’ Hospices. This also involvesteaching end of life care to paid carers who support adults with learning disabilities.

As well as sharing my knowledge with attendees, I have learnt a lot from these sessions and from listening to the experiences of the carers.At Farleigh, I run sessions to raise awareness of dementia. This hospice is a registered organisation with Dementia Friends and so we invite volunteers, trustees and our non-clinical colleagues to attend a dementia information session. We offer several different levels of teaching on this topic, depending on job role, to encourage the whole organisation to support people living with dementia. On other days, I may be supporting teaching sessions on moving and handling, mental capacity, advance care planning or be on my knees demonstrating basic life support. Every day really is different!

Planning a teaching session takes much longer than you expect. A lot of my time can be spent preparing each session to ensure that our teaching is evidence-based, includes national guidelines,appeals to the different ways people learn and is accessible to all. We try to make our teaching as interactive as possible, and now I’m on the ‘other side’ I can see how much you can learn from role play!

If possible, I finish my working day by cycling home. If I’m pedaling alongside the river or on the new cycle path, it’s a great opportunity to reflect on how the day has gone and think about future teaching sessions. Rest assured, if I’m cycling along Broomfield Road, all I think about is keeping safe!At the moment my ‘working day’ continues into the evening, because I am completing a teaching qualification with Anglia Ruskin University.

It is essential in an educational role to understand howto enable and support others to learn in a meaningful way. We also have to be well-informed about specialist palliative care and a wide range of other topics, so my bedtime reading can be quite varied!”