Here, Teresa Burdett, senior lecturer in integrated health care; professional lead for interprofessional learning and education, unit lead for foundations of integrated care and person-centred services, and Lee-Ann Fenge, professor in social care, both from Bournemouth University, explore the rhetoric and reality of the NHS Long Term Plan (NHS England, 2019a) and examine some of the challenges highlighted by the NHS Interim People Plan (NHS England, 2019b), which sets out a game plan for delivery to NHS employees.
Being an unpaid caregiver isn’t something that you plan or prepare for, so when my mother was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND), a non-curable, life-limiting, neurodegenerative condition, it was like entering into the abyss of the unknown, but knowing the devastating and inevitable outcome.
Dehisced surgical wounds are a common occurrence and are seen both in primary and secondary care. The impact of a dehisced wound is far reaching. For the National Health Service, there are increased in-patient costs and additional resources in terms of an extended healing time, such as staffing and dressing materials and therapies. For the patient, a dehisced wound can impact significantly on their wellbeing and quality of life and for patients of working age, the economic impact of not being able to work can be enormous. This article discusses the incidence of wound dehiscence, outlines the types of wounds which are most likely to dehisce, and the most common reason for this, wound infection. Strategies for managing wound infection, including the use of antiseptic and antimicrobial products, together with a frequently used therapy, topical negative pressure therapy (TNPT), are also discussed.
In each issue we investigate a hot topic currently affecting you and your community practice. Here, we look at How community nurses can promote self-care.
With healthcare budgets being squeezed ever tighter and management teams constantly striving to maintain or improve reductions in pressure ulcer incidence, while demonstrating costsavings and efficiency gains, there are clear, and often conflicting pressures on both primary healthcare providers and their staff when it comes to selecting and using specialist, powered air mattress replacement systems for the prevention and management of pressure ulcers.
Control of elimination used to be one of the earliest skills learned in childhood. However, changes in child-rearing practice, society and resources have resulted in toilet training happening later now than in previous generations. There are, however, still expectations that children will be independent with toileting when they start school, unless they have a disability. For children who do have a delay in attaining continence, it is often mistakenly assumed by families and healthcare professionals that lack of urinary or faecal control may be related solely to behavioural or developmental issues, which a child will outgrow, so that the problem should resolve with time. This is rarely the case and most children and families need proactive support and treatment.
Every child deserves the very best start in life and health visitors play a crucial role in achieving this ambition. Public Health England (PHE) has started a process of refreshing the so called 4–5–6 model for health visiting and the healthy child programme. To feed into this robustly, the Institute of Health Visiting (iHV) consulted its members, as well as mums and other stakeholders, and went to the evidence to determine what its own position should be on necessary changes to these important national initiatives.
