How community clinicians are optimising care plans with comprehensive wound data
How community clinicians are optimising care plans with comprehensive wound data
Case Study
Overview
Almost four million people in the United Kingdom have chronic wounds that take months or even years to heal. A primary obstacle facing nurses and wound care practitioners is a lack of data—the standardised measurements, records and insights that can inform care plans.
Minuteful for Wound, Healthy.io’s digital wound management solution, enables standardised measurement and documentation of wounds, and monitoring over time. With reliable data at their fingertips, clinicians can quickly identify deteriorating wounds, optimise care plans and enhance wound management processes.
Livewell Southwest is the first UK community health services provider to roll-out Minuteful for Wound at scale, with over 200 staff adopting the solution including District Nurses, Tissue Viability Nurses and Podiatrists.
£5.6B
annual cost of managing chronic wounds in the UK
81%
of the wound management cost is incurred in the community
£4000
average cost of a chronic wound patient
The Challenge
Livewell Southwest provides NHS community healthcare services in Plymouth, South Hams and West Devon, including some of the highest areas of deprivation in the country. It serves 330,000 people, over 5,000 of whom suffer from chronic wounds. Many of those patients are housebound and treated at home by district nurses.
Livewell staff found that their use of paper rulers for wound assessments was resulting in significant unwarranted variability in measurements. They identified the need for standardised measurement, documentation, and management of wounds, to support informed clinical decision-making, care plan design, and staff upskilling.
The Solution
Livewell Southwest partnered with Healthy.io to deploy Minuteful for Wound, a digital wound management solution. Now, clinicians and patients alike benefit from standardised digital measurements, the ability to track wounds over time and consult with experts when necessary with immediate effect on care plans.
Measure
Scan the wound using a smartphone and a calibration sticker
Assess
Add or update wound documentation in the app
Monitor
Track healing over time from a centralised portal
Outcomes
Improved documentation
Standardised wound imagery and data collection help streamline assessments, reduce the risk of human error and support objective clinical decision making. The resulting data and imagery are accessible via a secure dedicated portal.
Patient engagement
Patients often find it difficult to tell whether or not their wound is healing. Now clinicians can share engaging visual records of each wound’s progress, offering patients an unmediated look at the healing process that has been shown to boost their engagement and adherence to care plans.
Optimised skill mixing
Non-registered staff can help manage wounds under the remote guidance of expert clinicians, easing the burden on senior staff while empowering junior nurses to provide quality care under specialist supervision. When the solution was used, visits by registered staff dropped from 70% to as low as 52%.
Early interventions
Improved wound monitoring has allowed for earlier interventions for non-healing wounds. Wounds that were flagged as non-healing were successfully stabilised, resulting in the same healing rates as the other wounds.
The quality of the app has allowed us to ensure that we are providing effective, timely care. It allows our senior staff members to have better oversight of the patients’ care and the treatment that we're providing.
Arielle Goodbourn,
District Nurse Manager
Get in touch to digitise your wound management programme
Citations and Footnotes
- CE marked and audited.
- Guest et al. Cohort study evaluating the burden of wounds to the UK’s National Health Service in 2017/2018: update from 2012/2013, BMJ Open, 2020.