The Queen’s Nursing Institute is holding its next annual conference at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London on Monday 28 September. The programme will be announced shortly and we will be bringing together a range of key speakers from national and local healthcare organisations, to speak about the most urgent issues facing community nursing and primary health care today.
Reading between the lines and ignoring all the political showboating that will inevitably precede the general election on 7 May, what are the key differences between the major parties? And what effect will this have on funding, jobs, nurses and, most importantly, quality of service?
The Cavell Nurses’ Trust has been in existence for close to 100 years, but as it’s not yet a well-known charity I’ll start by telling you a bit about its work.
Like many other areas of the NHS, community nursing has suffered from underfunding and a lack of understanding of its true value. However, more recently, there has been a surge in interest in community nursing and a growing appreciation of its potential. Ensuring community nursing is ‘fit for purpose’ is fundamental.
It’s that time of year again where Christmas is a distant memory and the longer evenings start to bring thoughts of summer. Unfortunately, the first shoots of spring also stir the fear of allergies in many of us. Allergies have become a widespread phenomenon and at any one time can affect one-in-four people in the UK. Common allergic conditions include hay fever, asthma, atopic eczema and food allergies, and many of these become worse in the spring/summer months.
Jason Beckford-Ball looks at how the upcoming general elections may affect the NHS and asks each party...
How will the general election result influence the future NHS?
Once patients’ leg ulcers are healed, it is recommended that you move them from compression bandaging into leg ulcer hosiery kits or maintenance hosiery. But nurses often have difficulty in getting patients to comply with long-term hosiery use — which does require a lot of commitment — and ulcers often return. We asked Leanne Atkin, vascular nurse specialist at Mid-Yorkshire NHS Trust, how to ensure that your patients keep healing and remain healed when they move into maintenance compression hosiery.
Choosing the correct dressing is often key to moving a wound along the healing trajectory, with its ability to deal with problems such as pain, excess exudate production and inflammation being crucial to the healing outcome. Infection is also a serious problem in many wounds and this article looks at the basics of wound infection as well as some of the main treatments, such as topical antimicrobials. However, clinicians are faced with a huge range of wound care products, many of which have antimicrobial properties. This article considers the use of one gelling fibrous silver dressing (Durafiber® Ag; Smith and Nephew), which is specifically designed to deal with many of the problems mentioned above, particularly excess exudate production and infection. The authors also presents the results of a small, prospective multicentre case series that was carried out to assess the efficacy of Durafiber Ag in a variety of wounds.
Due to concerns over pressure ulcer incidence data, a collaborative project was undertaken with the aim of improving quality of care within residential homes, specifically in relation to pressure ulcer prevention. The project comprised a residential home staff education programme based on the SSKIN bundle. The objective was to enhance staff awareness of pressure ulcer risk and their knowledge of pressure ulcer prevention approaches, such as the appropriate use of skin care products (ProshieldTM; H&R Healthcare) and the targeted use of local pressure-relieving methods such as dermal pads (AdermaTM; Smith & Nephew). To support residential home staff in putting pressure ulcer prevention theory into practice, skin care products and dermal pads were made more easy for staff to access, thereby facilitating the desired change in practice. Implementation of the project was supervised by the local tissue viability team. Tissue viability nurses — with the support of Smith & Nephew — delivered an educational package to the staff in each residential home including the SSKIN bundle and the appropriate use of local pressure-relieving techniques. A ‘stock-box’ containing supplies of dermal pads and skin care products was provided for each residential home immediately after the training — this meant that the staff could begin using these as soon as a risk assessment identified a patient who needed off-loading. Pressure ulcer incidence data routinely captured before the project began was compared with data from a similar time period following the project — this helped the authors assess and reflect upon the impact of the project.
