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Outpatient Therapy

Grow Your Rehab Therapy Practice Using Paid Ads and Search Engine Marketing

When done right, paid advertising and search engine marketing are amazing tools to reach new patients and grow your business. By applying several basic tactics, you can start using powerful digital advertising platforms like Google and Facebook to target specific audiences and help ensure a steady flow of business for your practice. Click to View […]

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Five Key Stressors Hospice Professionals Face, with Guidance for Support

Hospice professionals help others face death and loss, while juggling interdisciplinary communications, quality compliance regulations and ever-evolving technologies. You are continually there for families and their dear ones who are passing away. But what about you? Get the eBook In caregiving professions, it is easy to get swept up in the needs of others and forget […]

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Leadership

Net Health’s CIO discusses diversity and how it can build a stronger organization

Diversity in the workplace is an on-going issue but it’s an issue with solutions. To build diversity, it takes forward-thinking initiatives, a reexamination of the hiring philosophy, and the support of the company’s decision-makers.  One such supporter of diversity in the workplace is Net Health’s CIO, Jason “JJ” James.  Recent social movements like Black Lives […]

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Tough Questions | Real Answers: Net Health’s Fireside Chat about Race

Net Health did something different recently. Nearly two hundred employees and their families gathered around their computer screens to take part in a landmark event in our company’s history – we called it a “Fireside Chat about Race”.  The purpose of this event was to have a truly open conversation about the controversial but relevant […]

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Wound Care

An Initial Checklist for Wound Healing Success

September 30, 2020 by Cathy Hess , BSN, RN, CWCN, VP, Chief Clinical Officer for Wound Care

We’ve learned quite a bit about wound care over the past decades. Clinicians know more, manufacturers are doing more, and the entire industry is working together to advance skin and wound caring for dressings, drugs, and devices.

While it’s been exciting and inspiring to see this evolution, wound care can still be challenging, and it can exact an emotional, physical and financial toll on patients and caregivers. Wound management is complex; multiple factors affect treatment and healing. It can be frustrating for even the most experienced provider as well as the patient.

Identifying factors that delay or impede wound healing is key to improving outcomes and patients’ lives. Taking these five steps will begin to ensure that optimal wound care practices are underway.  And while a simple checklist should never be considered the only arbiter of best practices, for busy clinicians and those new to wound care, it can be a good reminder of select foundational actions that help ensure better healing.

  1. Understand the local and systemic factors that may be delaying healing. Desiccation, infection, or abnormal bacterial presence, as well as maceration, oxygenation, necrosis, trauma, edema, and other local factors can impact healing.  Systemic factors may also impede wound healing such as age, stress, comorbidities (such as diabetes), ischemia, select medications, smoking to name a few.
  2. Note the age of the patient. Wounds in older patients may heal more slowly. There are various factors that contribute to healing challenges, including comorbidities and compromised immune systems. If any of these are present, pay closer attention to the wound and take prompt steps to intervene.
  3. Consider the patient’s body type. An obese patient may have difficulties healing due to poor blood supply to adipose tissues and difficulty treating wounded areas especially within skin to skin contact (modification of treatments may be necessary). Stress the importance of proper hygiene and thoroughly check the patient to make certain new wounds are identified.
  4. Ensure your patient is getting proper nutrition. Ongoing nutrition assessment is necessary because the visual appearance of the patient or wound is not a reliable indicator of whether the patient is getting enough nutrients. Partnering with dieticians and reviewing the patient’s medical record and lab values can help identify deficiencies.
  5. Pay close attention to patients who are immunosuppressed or undergoing radiation therapy. Suppression of the immune system by disease, medication, or age can delay wound healing. Radiation therapy can cause ulceration or change in the skin, either immediately after a treatment or aftercare has ended.

This checklist is just a start. You should add other care strategies that work best for your environment and patient demographics.  Additionally, to achieve successful wound healing, it’s important to follow industry and facility best practices, including assessment, planning, implementation, evaluation and documentation.

We’ve seen tremendous advances in skin and wound care over the past decades and learned much about best treatment practices. Paying attention to the primary factors that impact wound healing – local and systemic – is essential to ensuring better outcomes. Using a basic checklist that covers key areas will start you on the journey toward better wound care results.

Please share your ideas for a wound care checklist with our blog readers. We look forward to hearing from you.

Learn about our EHR software solutions for wound care – Net Health Wound Care for Hospital Outpatient and Private Practice.

Cathy Thomas Hess is VP, Chief Clinical Officer for Wound Care at Net Health.  She has over 30 years of experience in wound care, authored hundreds of journal articles, spoken at both national and international events, and has authored book chapters and the best-selling handbook titled Product Guide to Skin and Wound Care, 8th edition. She continues to be influential in the wound care community today and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards for Advances in Skin and Wound Care, authoring a monthly column entitled Practice Points, and Today’s Wound Clinic.

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Filed Under: Blog Posts

About the Author

Cathy Hess , BSN, RN, CWCN

VP, Chief Clinical Officer for Wound Care

Cathy oversees clinical and professional services for Net Health. Cathy gained over 25 years of expertise in various acute care, long-term care, sub-acute care facilities, home-health agencies, and outpatient wound care department settings. She is the author of The Clinical Wound Manager™ Manual Series, Clinical Guide to Skin and Wound Care – Seventh Edition (also translated into Italian and Portuguese).


See all posts by Cathy Hess , BSN, RN, CWCN

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