Pressure ulcers: understanding the challenges of promoting quality

Pressure ulcers affect quality of life and general wellbeing, and create significant difficulties for patients, their carers and families. Pressure ulcers are associated with morbidity and mortality, and prove costly for healthcare providers. This article identifies the Government’s quality agenda and the importance of maintaining, developing and delivering quality care for the prevention of pressure ulceration

General elections — a new era for health care and tissue viability?

This has already been a busy year for practitioners, with Accident and Emergency departments full, hospitals closing to non-emergency admissions and elective surgery being cancelled. In addition, all the political parties are using the NHS as a priority area for the upcoming general election. Health care and its funding continues to be an issue that dominates headlines, with each political party promising it will be safe in their hands. But what are the major parties promising

Do we understand health-related- quality-of-life outcomes?

Last year I was afforded the opportunity of investigating Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) outcomes for patients with wounds, through a Florence Nightingale Travel Scholarship. Since my return from Australia, I have been thinking about how we identify and enhance HRQoL outcomes for the range of wound conditions that we see and treat in clinical practice

Nurse education 2015: what is changing?

Quality With Compassion: The Future Of Nursing Education report by Willis (2012) identified that the move to an all-degree nursing profession could not be held directly responsible for poor practice or the perceived decline in standards of care. Nor did it find any evidence that degree-level registration was damaging to patient care

A survey of nurses' and podiatrists' attitudes, skills and knowledge of lower extremity wound care

Published literature has identified deficits in the wound care knowledge of many healthcare professionals involved in tissue viability, which may suggest some patients are receiving suboptimal care. This article explores podiatrists’ and nurses’ attitudes, knowledge and skills regarding lower extremity wound care. Interactive electronic voting pads were used to survey a sample of nurses and podiatrists (n=102). The results were used to inform the delivery of wound care education at the Unversity of Huddersfield in order to encourage future collaboration and foster better working relationships between nurses and podatrist

The future of tissue viability

As we all attend the annual Wounds UK event in Harrogate, it is probably an ideal time to reflect on the changes over the last twelve months and tissue viability as a specialty service. Is there a future for tissue viability, or will the speciality be subsumed into the role of the generalist practitioner