Home parenteral nutrition and intestinal failure

Home Parenteral Nutrition (HPN) patients need long-term feeding intravenously through a catheter – or feeding tube placed into a vein.

The HPN service at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, is run by a team of healthcare professionals with a range of skills to help patients who need to receive their food or nutrition in this way.

Our services

Different patients need HPN for different lengths of time. We admit patients who are going to need more long-term parenteral nutrition currently to Ward 16 at the Freeman Hospital. Our specialist team trains patients to manage their own HPN at home.

We make sure that patients are established on HPN and are comfortable enough to use the system at home after their hospital treatment. Depending on their medical condition or surgical plan, patients might need to be admitted to hospital for about three or more weeks.

When patients leave hospital and are stable, our team will see them at follow-up appointments initially frequently, but then every three months.

We also supply patients with contact details so they can access help and advice 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Regional centre

Newcastle is a designated regional centre for HPN in the North East of England. We currently help care for about 150 patients on parenteral nutrition in their own homes across the north-east and north Cumbria.

Part of our service is to manage complications surrounding intestinal failure, and we see patients who are referred to us for HPN and intestinal failure surgery from other hospitals in the region.

Audit results

Audits of our service help us to develop and improve services for all patients. We are often involved in audits and research programmes and present these results to national and international clinical conferences. If you like to get involved in research projects, please speak to on of our doctors.

Our service has excellent results for infection rates. The Care Quality Commission recommends the level of Central Venous Catheter blood stream-related infections should be 0.99 per 1,000 catheter days. The infection rate for the Freeman’s HPN service for 2019 was 0.30 per 1,000 catheter days.

Who you could meet

See above for a list of professionals who you might meet. You can find out more about the Nutrition Services Team.

Award-winning service

Dr Chris Mountford has received achievement awards at the BAPEN conference for work in nutrition support and education.

Sister Hayley Leyland was awarded the British Society of Gastroenterology nurse of the year award in 2019.

The Newcastle Clinical nutrition team led the Northern Nutrition Network which was joint winner of the national Shire Award for Gastrointestinal Excellence in 2012.

You can find out more in our In the news section