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Tissue viability service
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About the service
The tissue viability service provides specialist advice, treatment and therapy in the management of patients with compromised skin condition and wounds requiring specialist advice. The service runs educational training packages to health care professionals and staff within care homes along with weekly specialist nurse-led clinics for chronic wound and leg ulcers.
Why would someone choose the service?
- The tissue viability service provides specialist enhanced knowledge and skills in the field of wound management, ensuring best evidence-based practice. This means that the patient’s condition is treated effectively reducing the need for need for hospital admission and prolonged treatment
Staff you may meet
- Nurses who choose to specialise in the mental health branch of nursing work with GPs, psychiatrists, psychologists, and others, to help care for patients. Increasingly, care is given in the community, with mental health nurses visiting patients and their families at home, in residential centres, in prisons or in specialist clinics or units.
- We have a range of specialist advisors working in our Trust – they give advice on a wide range of different things, depending on what service they work in. So it could be, for example, mental health, stopping smoking, healthy eating or diabetes.
Why a professional should choose the service
- Achieve contracted activity
- Instrumental in achieving pressure ulcer CQUIN and developing best practice guidelines
- Undertake patient and public involvement (PPI) audits every six months
Support offered
The service provides a range of specialist wound management including:
- Prevention of pressure damage via equipment, education and training and risk assessment
- Management of pressure damage
- Wound assessment and management
- Provision of specialist advice including the development of treatment protocols and wound care formulary
- Treatment of venous leg ulcers including compression therapy, bandage technique, differential diagnosis and advice for healed leg ulcers
- Use of specialist wound management products such as:
- Maggot therapy (larvae)
- Topical negative pressure therapy (V.A.C, venturi)
- Flowtron therapy
- Versajet therapy
Outcomes
- Recover skin integrity
- Ability to self-manage and self-care
- Educated to prevent future problems
Referrals accepted from:
A & E, AHPs, CMHTs, Consultants, GP staff, GPs, Hospital staff, Midwives, Other NHS services
Referral criteria:
- The service will accept referrals for patients with complex wound-needs including those who are either a resident in a care home or a resident of Barnsley
- Referrals to the service come from healthcare professionals. These are received by telephone, letter, fax and electronic methods including the NHS choose and book system
- The tissue viability service covers all community-based patients under the care of a Barnsley GP, practice nurse in a GP surgery and residents in private nursing homes in the Barnsley area