How many times have you wondered, or questioned, whether an ordered wound treatment was appropriate?
I would not be not surprised if you said, “More often than I would like.” Unfortunately, that is the reality for wound care specialists today.
According to a 2018 BMJ Open article, nurse researchers found an overuse of wound treatments with limited evidence and low value. They also found an underuse of evidence-based treatments.
Hand hygiene is nothing new in healthcare. It has become increasingly important throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a wound care nurse, you know hand hygiene is essential in preventing infections when providing patient care, as we discuss in the blog post “The Case of the Dirty Wound Care Clinic.”
If you provide care outside of the traditional clinical settings, such as a hospital or a wound care clinic, you know how difficult it can be to maintain good hand hygiene. Without running water, gloves or sanitizer, the risk of infection or its spread is evident.
A patient’s core body temperature must be above 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit and below 107.6 for wound healing to occur.
The loss of moisture from any surface by evaporation is accompanied by cooling of the surface. So, as wound tissues lose moisture, a cooling effect occurs resulting in lower wound temperature.
Even a decrease of only 2 degrees Celsius is sufficient enough to affect the biological healing process of your patients. This is because cells and enzymes function optimally only at normal body temperature.
When you hear the words hyperbaric oxygen, you probably think of a troubled scuba diver with decompression sickness in need of immediate live-saving medical care.
But hyperbaric oxygen therapy — HBOT for short — is also a go-to therapy routinely used in wound care.
To learn the basics about HBOT, we spoke with wound care experts in the U.S. and abroad.
The world has drastically changed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One alteration to our daily lives is the practice of avoiding crowds in an effort to slow down the spread and decrease risk of exposure to coronavirus.
So, for everyone’s health and well-being, we’ve moved our popular Wild on Wounds Conference (WOW) to a virtual format this year.
The medical record is an essential piece of evidence in any legal case alleging professional negligence against wound care nurses and others.
As you know, one of the purposes of the medical record is to reflect what nursing care was given to the patient. The entries speak to the quality of the care given.
The entries are supplemented by oral testimony at trial of those whose notations are in the medical record. A jury then decides if care was given that meets the standard of care in the situation or if the caregiver failed to meet his or her legal obligation.
How often have you found yourself in the conundrum of deciding whether a wound on the foot of a diabetic patient is a diabetic foot ulcer or a pressure injury?
Probably more than once. This is a hotly debated issue among wound care clinicians.
In this post, we’ll dissect the facts and provide a clear understanding of how to differentiate the two types of foot wounds.
Whether you’ve been in wound care for many years, or are a newcomer to the field, you have likely heard the terms TIME and maybe TIMERS.
The two words are acronyms pertaining to clinical categories related to comprehensive wound assessment, management and wound bed preparation for hard-to-heal wounds, said Donald Wollheim, MD, FAPWCA, WCC, DWC, a board-certified surgeon of the American Board of Surgery and clinical instructor with the Wound Care Education Institute (WCEI).
In 2019, researchers in China released an important study on interventions with ileal conduit patients after having undergone surgery for bladder cancer.
It has since proven to be a wonderful resource for all providers who work with ileal conduit patients.
The study began in 2014 with the establishment of a “dedicated team” of ostomy specialists who provided standardized postoperative care.
Its purpose was to undercover the effects of a more involved, systematized program of postoperative care for patients with ileal conduits who were discharged from the hospital.
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