RMDU specialist team

Our nursing team is made up of staff nurses, Specialist Nurses and Healthcare Assistants.  Our staff nurses’ focus on providing quality care to each person and understand how much ‘the details’ matter.  Specialist nurses, with a high level of experience and training, guide your plan of care and can represent your values and decisions to other service providers and healthcare workers.  Healthcare Assistants help you with bathing, grooming, dressing and at mealtimes.

Our physiotherapists are committed to helping patients maximise movement potential and enhance quality of life. This is achieved by managing physical challenges such as pain, muscle weakness and deconditioning, breathlessness, lymphoedema and fatigue, caused by illness and the treatment of illness. We provide an individual assessment to determine what each patient’s specific needs are and develop a treatment plan based on the outcome of this assessment. The physiotherapist works closely with each patient, using physical approaches such as therapeutic exercise (gym-based and hydrotherapy), mobilisation techniques as well as electrotherapy modalities (such as Transcutaneous Electrical Stimulation – TENS), to help that person achieve their identified movement and functional goals.

Services are delivered to in patients on all three sites and to outpatients in Harold’s Cross and Blackrock Hospices. Patients in the latter two sites also have access to the aquatic physiotherapy service.

Dietitian’s diagnose and treat dietary and nutritional problems for people. These problems may include:

• having a reduced appetite
• feeling full quickly
• losing weight without trying to
• having a change in your ability to swallow food and drinks
• a change in your taste

These problems can cause you and your family anxiety and worry.

The dietitian can help, by offering you and your family counselling and support on dietary problems. They will provide you with advice and support with nutritional supplements and artificial nutrition (being fed via a tube or intravenously). They will give you the most up to date and evidence based information and will make sure the nutrition treatment plan is tailormade to fit your needs.

Communication and swallowing are the most basic of human needs. Some life-limiting illnesses can affect your ability to speak, understand, and/or swallow safely. Changes in these functions can impact your quality of life by reducing your ability to make your needs known, savour your meals or swallow your medicines.

SLTs work with your speech, voice, language, and often alternative or assistive methods for communicating (AAC), including electronic devices. Working with you and the multidisciplinary team, SLTs provide individual communication strategies to help you remain engaged with the people you love, and your carers; make choices for your daily living; and participate in planning your medical care.

SLTs assess your safety, comfort and enjoyment of eating, drinking and swallowing.  We provide swallowing education and therapy to you and your carers. This may include environment, and/or diet texture alterations, to help you to safely and comfortably manage the foods and drinks you like.

SLTs help you to understand and adapt to changes in your communication and swallowing and give you strategies to maintain quality of life, so you can continue to participate in your social and care preferences, as your disease progresses.

Our team work across all aspects of the hospice to ensure your time with us is as comfortable as possible.

As the leading and largest palliative care provider in Ireland, we are a teaching facility with links to Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and other third level institutions.  Healthcare students from different disciplines come to us to train and you will meet them throughout our service.