Assessment
A holistic assessment will help determine your patient needs and help provide a shift from managing to healing wounds. This session will include engaging activities to help you understand how to perform wound assessments that can help make a real difference to your patients.
Infection
All wounds contain some bacteria and fungi, but it is only when they generate a host response that this is likely to stall wound healing. Here you will learn how to identify signs of local signs of wound infection, and determine what treatment is needed.
Compression
Venous disease often causes local chronic oedema. Compression therapy is needed to treat both the oedema and venous leg ulceration. But the effectiveness of the outcome will depend on the type and stiffness of the compression therapy used. This session will explain how to select compression that will treat the oedema and promote healing.
Breaking through Biofilm
All non-healing wounds are thought to contain biofilm. The wound cannot start to heal until the biofilm is removed. Here, you will learn why biofilm delays healing, how to tell if it is present and eradicate it from the wound.
Debridement
Unless dead tissue and biofilm are removed, a wound will not heal. The debridement method used needs to be aggressive enough to achieve this, while also safe for the patient. In this session, you will learn what constitutes safe and effective debridement and be introduced to a new method, chemical debridement.
Lower limb: vascular assessment
To avoid patient harm, it is vital to make sure there is no significant arterial disease present before applying compression therapy. The gold standard way to assess this is to calculate the ankle brachial pressure index. This session will demonstrate how to do this.
Pressure care zone
Here, delegates will test their skills on how to categorise pressure ulcers, as well as differentiate them from moisture associated skin damage (MASD). Case study exercises will help them practise their skills in spotting red flags, indicating where patients are at risk of real harm from pressure damage.
Healing chronic wounds
When presented with a hard-to-heal wound, you need to provide effective tissue and moisture management. This session will help you sharpen your knowledge of TIMERS and finetune your wound bed preparation skills, both of which will help kick start healing.