The National Clinical Programme for Epilepsy has a vision for the delivery of epilepsy care in Ireland. This vision is to:
The vision is built upon a system where a cohort of new experts in nursing will be helping to manage the requirements of good quality care in the management of Epilepsy. Care will be centralized in epilepsy centres when necessary and decentralized in a structured primary care programme where possible. A sophisticated and robust means of electronic information management will be developed to become a defacto disease registry within which the important evidence-based metrics underlying good clinical practice will be gathered. Front-line physicians delivering care at the emergency department interface will be provided with an integrated seizure care pathway that will reduce admissions and length of stay, whilst improving patient safety by eliminating treatment variability. Finally, for the 15% or so of very difficult to control epilepsy, the national epilepsy surgery programme, will be enhanced and expanded over 2 sites to provide world-class access to complex but potentially curative surgery.
The programme has made significant gains and realisation of some of the objectives of the programme can already be seen with the development of epilepsy centres, 16.5WTE ANP Epilepsy in post, an award winning EPR in use across the country and the development of additional highly specialised centre.
The activity of the ANPs has grown exponentially and this is reflected in the overall reduction of both patients admitted to hospital with Epilepsy and the AvLOS of Epilepsy patients when admitted to hospital.
The programme has been awarded an international nursing award for its description of the new National Epilepsy Service of Ireland. Click here to view our video describing the service.
Read or download the Model of Care for Epilepsy
