'The SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) pandemic saw the introduction of safety measures such as social distancing, isolation and shielding. This has facilitated health care services transformation, particularly in tissue viability services, where a decrease in community nursing visits, limited outpatient appointments and few face-to-face GP appointments have increased the need for patients to be actively involved in their own care. Such a shift has contributed towards patients and health professionals (HCP) sharing treatment and care responsibilities to maintain the patients' health. This shift brings about its own challenges, with patients requiring a degree of knowledge and skills of wound care to be able to confidently manage their wounds. The terms self-care, shared care and supported self-management are often used to refer to patient involvement in their treatment and care but a lack of consensus around the extent of patient involvement and an absence of strategic guidelines for shared or self-management of lower limb wounds contributes towards difficulties in understanding the extent of patient involvement. This paper provides a narrative review of current literature focused on shared, self or supported self-management practices and perceptions in the management of lower limb wounds.
Like many sectors, tissue viability services have been affected by and had to learn lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has had an impact on service delivery and patient communication, and there has been some debate over whether this will permanently change the ways in which care is delivered. A group of specialist nurses and academics working in wound care met online via Zoom on 15th June 2021 to discuss how care has evolved since the start of the pandemic, and what this might look like as we move forward. This builds on a previous discussion that took place one year earlier (18th June 2020), in which a similar group discussed the challenges of delivering care at the height of the pandemic, which was published in Wounds UK in September 2020 (Fletcher et al, 2020).
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected many different services over the last year, including tissue viability. In some cases these changes may have helped us see both the good and also what needs changing within the service. As things begin to return to normal you may want to justify and add to your service using the new information acquired. In this article, Karen Ousey explains how to make a business case for your service and what it requires.
