Advanced Wound Care Solutions Benefit Patients and Skilled Nursing Facilities
Skilled nursing facilities are under enormous pressure to provide excellent care to patients with complex medical needs. Healogics can help by providing wound care specialists who offer specialized advanced wound care in both inpatient and post-acute settings.
Wound care treatment requires extensive training. Healogics leads the industry in training wound care specialists and provides proven clinical practice guidelines to further support Wound Care Centers® and skilled nursing facilities’ multi-disciplinary care teams. Given the high incidence of chronic wounds in aging patients, the importance of comprehensive wound care in skilled nursing facilities to promote wound healing cannot be understated.
Wounds Can Yield Serious Consequences
Aging patients in skilled nursing facilities are susceptible to developing chronic wounds, such as pressure injuries, due to the inability to move on their own. Depending on its severity, a non-healing wound left untreated may require months of medical treatment or even hospitalization in some cases. According to the National Pressure Injury Advisory Panel (NPIAP), there’s an alarmingly high incidence rate of pressure injuries averaging up to 30% within skilled nursing facilities.
Patients suffering from a non-healing wound are often living with three to four additional chronic conditions that negatively impact a wound’s ability to heal on its own. Age, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer are all factors that contribute to the inability to heal wounds without specialized care. The longer a wound goes untreated, the greater the risk of infection, amputation and other complications.
- Up to 25% of people living with diabetes will have a foot ulcer in their lifetime
- 50% of patients die within five years of amputation
- 82% of lower leg amputations are due to poor circulation of the affected limb
Educational Offerings Customized for Skilled Nursing Facilities
For 25 years, we’ve healed over 4 million wounds, helping hospitals and skilled nursing facilities face the challenges of advanced wound care treatments. We provide our physicians and wound care specialists – both employed and affiliated – with the specialized wound care training courses and resources needed to care for complex patient populations. Our providers work with dedicated multi-disciplinary teams to develop care plans designed to promote optimal healing for the patients we serve. The wide range of educational offerings we provide to aid in infection prevention, new tissue growth and successful wound closure are:
Bedside in-services – Specific education led by physicians, physician assistants (PAs) and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) such as the importance of turning and repositioning, rationale about specific dressing choices, why protein is important for wound healing, how care teams can encourage supplements and protein that impact the patients your facility clinicians are caring for.
Videos – Our robust video series of topics include wound measuring, pressure injury staging, nutrition and wound healing, pressure injury prevention and wound dressing selection.
Skills fairs – We partner with durable medical equipment vendors, compression therapy and negative pressure vac therapy representatives to provide hands-on learning on advanced wound care modalities.
Resources – Informative marketing materials on topics such as peripheral artery disease (PAD), diabetes and heart disease are provided by our wound care specialists and post-acute account managers to enhance wound care knowledge and impact wound healing with patients.
Results Driven
The Healogics Wound Science Initiative is our commitment to use research to advance wound care science and continually improve treatment. The information we gain through this research and analysis guides our treatment protocols, so we are continuously reducing recovery times and costs. In fact, patients treated by Healogics have a 9% lower all-cause total cost of care than patients who treat their wounds elsewhere.
We help facilities enhance their quality of wound care so they can be successful. For example, a partner facility reported zero deficiencies related to wound care during its annual public health survey. They attributed these results to the collaborative partnership with Healogics which included the integrated care, guidance and education provided. We firmly believe that people who are educated and informed about their condition or the conditions of the patients they serve have a higher chance of healing and prevention.
Contact our Post-Acute Wound Care Team today to learn more about how you can improve wound healing in your facility. Call 1-888-252-4325 or email us at postacute@healogics.com.