Improving Postoperative Wound Outcomes Through Patient-Centered Education and Systemic Tools

Announcer:
This is Spotlight on Wound Care on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Karen Bauer, who’s a Certified Nurse Practitioner Wound Specialist at Emory Heart and Vascular in Atlanta, Georgia. She’ll be discussing best practices for patient-centered post-op wound care. Here’s Dr. Bauer now.

Dr. Bauer:
I think that one of the biggest obstacles with patients adhering to our recommendations postoperatively is education and access. If you look at most of our patient education pieces, they are written at a higher grade level than the average person can take in. And oftentimes, it is either verbally given to the patient or written on a discharge summary where the patient doesn’t really know how or where to find it. And oftentimes we lack the attention that we need to coordinate care with home health, the receiving post-acute care center, or simply the patient’s family or whoever is going to be working with the patient to take care of them. I think that the biggest obstacle is truly not reaching our patients optimally when we are doing the education.

We need to start at the basics, and that’s where we’re lacking. We have to really look at the patient, their own unique socioeconomic situation, who’s caring for them, and where they are so that we can meet them where they are at both access and resource-wise, but also educationally. We know that to deliver truly quality care, we have to have systemic tools. So as I talk about access and education for patients, I think that we also have to employ evidence-based practices that allow the patient to have “if this, then this”—basically clinical algorithms that are disseminated to all settings of care. So often we focus on the postsurgical recovery unit when we need to be looking at things like the home health nurses, the patient’s family, the outpatient clinics, and the post-acute setting with those tools so that we reach everybody. But ultimately, I think that we need to be working with those industry partners, our research initiatives, and our EMRs to help produce systemic tools that will actually be utilized by not only the patient but the people who are circling around them in the postsurgical setting. 

Often in surgery we just focus on closing the incision. But there are so many new ways that we can help optimize and reduce surgical site complications. So I think that if I left everybody with something, it would be to really look into some of those new dressings and devices and then make sure that we’re employing all the resources possible to help coordinate the care of the patient.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Karen Bauer discussing how we can improve outcomes in post-op wound care with a patient-centered approach. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Spotlight On Wound Care on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!