Shhh! Long-term care people are often not comfortable talking publicly about wounds. 

True, residents in long-term facilities do get wounds — even though we all work very hard to make sure they don’t — but we’d rather not talk about the subject.  However, in reality, wounds happen … of course they do, in an industry where many patients are bedridden for long periods of time.  Of course, wounds happen in an industry where there is a higher incidence of residents having high blood sugar, aging skin, slowing blood flow and other factors causing and affecting wounds. 

Today, many wound care-related conversations in our industry lead to negativity because they can also raise the question about quality, cleanliness and care standards. But as an industry, do we deserve this negativity about something that occurs naturally, often as part of aging and restricted lifestyles? 

Perhaps it’s time for the long-term care industry to take a new perspective on wounds and wound care. 

By embracing the reality that wounds happen, even in the best facilities, we can inspire more transparent and productive conversations toward improving wound care. By elevating wound care in priority, we can more effectively stimulate dialog and innovate solutions for managing people, time and resources to benefit our residents while reducing organizational cost and risk.

When wound reality becomes less stigmatized, facilities can more readily adopt a positive “wound care culture” — an environment of shared values and beliefs with the potential to benefit all parties: patient, facility and industry. 

Creating a wound care culture may require some transformation, but in most cases, it requires a less intrusive reorientation of perspective and priority. Today, the wound care paradigm centers on the tactical, the cause and effect of preventing wounds and then caring for those that occur. By shifting that paradigm from tactical to strategic, the long-term care industry can elevate wound care into a dynamic component of organizational character and brand within a larger mission of excellence. 

A wound care culture is built on a platform of education where learning and development programs are enhanced to teach various levels of wound care to all those who interact with residents, especially relating to identifying wound issues and the best practices for caring for them. Armed with knowledge, your resident care team can make inspections frequently and feel comfortable communicating to others on the team about their observations, since there would be no stigma in doing so. In the short run, team administrators would provide for the time and materials that staff needs to make this quality standard of care happen. Because in the long run, this process offers the potential to reduce the time and materials needed, since wounds will be identified earlier and heal faster. 

Although most organizations do keep records of wounds and treatments, that database is sometimes perceived in a negative way, as demonstrating shortcomings. In a wound care culture, transformation would occur where records become positive motivators that demonstrate that the team and facility are performance-driven toward achieving improvement.

It’s important to reinforce achievement by making wound care a positive experience for team members, as well. Develop a program to reward team members for reducing the number of wounds overall, by identifying wounds earlier and by improving recovery metrics. Invest your team in a wound care culture and make them proud of their accomplishments in helping patients and in improving outcomes. It will serve as an important, positive measure of brand and care quality for patients, for healthcare facilities and for our industry.

David Navazio is President and CEO of Gentell, one of North America’s largest wound care dressing manufacturers, manufacturing and supplying efficient, affordable patient-specific wound care treatments to nursing homes, hospitals, home care, hospices and other providers.

The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.