About
Sue Rowlands is the IV/OPAT Team lead at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust. She is a Registered General Nurse with many years’ experience as a senior nurse within the general and cardiac intensive care environment. Latterly she has held roles within the remit of patient safety, during which time she focussed on the reduction in Device Related Hospital Acquired Bacteraemias (DRHABs). This lead her to her initial ultrasound guided line insertion training at Addenbrookes Hospital, following which she returned to Wolverhampton to establish the Wolverhampton IV/OPAT service in 2012. The key deliverables of the team are long iv line insertion for a variety of conditions across the Trust, the provision of an OPAT service by working with a large number of community teams and the continuing reduction in device related hospital acquired bacteraemias.
Alongside her critical care qualification, Sue has also obtained post graduate education in Patient Safety and a Post Graduate Certificate in Leadership and Organisational Research from the University of Worcester, during which she investigated issues relating to the clinical education of ward staff relating to iv administration.
Sue was a member of the board advising on the RCN IV Standards which were published in December 2016, and is co-ordinating the creation of a standardised approach to line related bacteria identification for use across NHS Trusts as part of the Device Related Infection Prevention Practice (DRIPPs) collaborative.
