Resources

With all nurses being required to keep up to date with their continued professional development (CPD) and to revalidate every three years, it is important to think about different learning styles and what works best for you to help you learn effectively. In addition, it is essential to recognise how others learn. Consideration of this will facilitate us to adapt our approach when supervising student nurses and to provide individualised, effective learning environments for them. Recently, I have experienced difficulties recruiting registered nurses and know this is not an isolated issue. To build and support our future workforce, it is vital that we focus time and energy to share our wealth of knowledge and encourage pro-active learners. By adapting teaching to cater for different learning styles, we can assist student nurses to optimise the learning opportunities available to them and support them to feel comfortable in recognising their own development needs and becoming competent nurses. Do take a look at this issue’s ‘community matters’ piece (pp. 10–16), which looks at different learning styles and introduces Microworld, a new animated and accessible way to learn about wound care (www.mymicroworld.online).

And, while on the subject of wound care education, the National Wound Care Strategy Programme (NWCSP) has also identified how crucial this is for all nurses with its recently published National Wound Care Core Capabilities Framework for England, which sets out the skills and knowledge needed to care for a person with a wound in whatever setting (pp. 18–19). The capabilities in this resource come in three tiers to accommodate your level of knowledge and skills and help you develop a person-centre approach to care.

I was especially pleased to read Sarah Hamilton-Fairley’s editorial on the work of the UK Sepsis Trust and their campaign for everyone, both public and healthcare professionals, to be ‘sepsis savvy’ (p. 31), as this is a condition we should all be continually on the look out for. Other editorials also flag up initiatives which might be useful for you and your patients, such as Urology Awareness Month (pp. 24–25), the new Leg Club^® exercise classes with Mr Motivator (p. 26), as well as the Primary Care Respiratory Society’s (PCRS) new pathway to help us think about the environmental impact of respiratory healthcare (pp. 28–29).

Such pieces, together with the clinical articles in this issue, brought home to me yet again the sheer diversity of community nursing and myriad of skill sets needed to work with individuals, families, children, and carers. So, I hope you find the articles helpful — and remember, your students are our future.

Annette Bades, editor-in-chief, JCN

In each issue we investigate a topic affecting you and your community practice. Here, we look at 'Teaching and learning styles and why they matter'

How fortunate we are to have specialist teams and services that provide wound care across the UK. But, these teams and services are frequently overwhelmed. Even in pre-pandemic times, increasing referrals, rising caseloads, and the complexities of supporting people with multiple morbidities conspire to challenge service delivery (Guest et al, 2020). At the same time, an over reliance on these teams’ skills by the rest of the system gives rise to the de-skilling of some groups, while inhibiting fundamental wound care skills development in others.

If I were a stick of rock, you would find the word ‘NURSE’ right through me (or maybe ‘community tissue viability nurse’ if there was enough room for all those letters!) So, in 2018, when I came into post as director of the National Wound Care Strategy programme (NWCSP), I saw the issue primarily through a clinical lens. I was not so cloistered that I thought wound care was just a nursing issue, but I did think that it was primarily a clinical challenge. If we could just get the clinical pathways sorted and get everyone who saw people with wounds (GPs, paramedics, podiatrists, surgeons and so on) to work in a more collaborative and coordinated way, we would solve the problem.

Reading the story of Anne’s journey with chronic oedema in a recent issue of JCN was quite disturbing (Rubio, 2021). That someone could have needlessly suffered for so long offers a wake-up call to us all, especially as it is, sadly, a fairly common story. Chronic oedema and lymphoedema are not well understood among many healthcare professionals, so the conditions often go untreated until a patient develops serious complications.

It is easy to say you are holding an awareness month, but let’s consider the why, what and how.

The Urology Foundation (TUF) is the only medical charity dedicated to improving the nation’s urological health across all urological conditions through the investment of cuttingedge research and the training and education of urology professionals

Data from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE, 2020) estimates that 1.5 percent of the adult population have a leg ulcer. To help combat this healthcare crisis, it is essential for stakeholders in lower limb care to collaborate both to raise awareness of leg ulcer prevalence and achieve better outcomes for those suffering with lower limb conditions.

Facing up to the climate crisis is a reality that affects us all in every aspect of our daily personal and professional lives. The delivery of health care inevitably incurs environmental costs, and the UK is regarded as a major contributor to global healthcare-related carbon emissions (Healthcare Without Harm, 2019). The need to address this issue is reflected in the 2019 NHS Long Term Plan and the goal of ultimately delivering a ‘net zero’ national health service for England (NHS England, 2019; 2020).

As serious Covid-19 cases thankfully continue to decline across the UK, we as carers and medical professionals, will hopefully begin to see a return to normal across our usual caregiving services and be able to look towards a brighter future.