Healthcare professionals are under increasing pressure to justify the quality of their work (Vowden and Vowden, 2010; Wound Care Today, 2020). To do so, comprehensive, accurate and current data which details and supports cost-effectiveness and the quality of the service provided is required. Audit and ongoing clinical data capture can provide the evidence to do this (Vowden and Vowden, 2010).
Sepsis is the body’s overreaction to an infection where, instead of fighting an infection, the immune system attacks the body’s own organs and tissues.
Sepsis can occur as a result of any infection, from a small cut or insect bite, to a chest or urinary tract infection (UTI). It is more common than heart attacks and kills more people each year than bowel, breast and prostate cancer and road accidents combined (Fleischmann et al, 2016).
This year brings international recognition of the contribution that the profession of nursing makes to global health. The executive board of the World Health Organization (WHO) met in Geneva on 30 January 2019 and designated 2020 to be the ‘Year of the Nurse and Midwife’, in honour of the 200th birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale (WHO, 2019a). This coincides with the publication of ‘The state of the worlds nursing report’ (WHO, 2019b), which was developed in collaboration with the Nursing Now Campaign and the International Council of Nurses (ICN).
Health and social care have seen significant pressures over the last few years, namely:
Captain Fearless is a nine-year-old girl who battles Wheeze Monsters with just her inhalers, spacer, bicycle bell and her magic goggles. The Big Bad Wolf has developed asthma and needs children’s help to know which inhaler to take and when, to blow the piggies’ house down.
I’m a nurse that tells stories with a health message. And I’m writing this editorial to encourage you to do the same and to explain why you should.
On 18th November 2019, the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) launched a new initiative — the International Community Nursing Observatory (ICNO). The purpose of the ICNO is to gather and analyse robust data to support the QNI’s policy, communications and campaigning around the
October played host to UK Malnutrition Awareness Week (MAW), and with it a real opportunity to focus on the realities of this often underplayed issue within health and social 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.
