How is COVID-19 affecting the delivery of wound care?

One of Wounds Canada’s goals is to support health-care professionals who provide wound care to Canadians. With COVID-19 spreading, research is necessary to minimize negative direct and indirect impacts on individual care providers and their families.

In order to address this, Wounds Canada has developed a qualitative online survey to collect data from the perspective of Canadian wound care clinicians (e.g., nurses, MDs and allied health professionals). Survey questions explore how the delivery of care has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how health-care providers have adapted delivery of wound care services with patients and their families.

Pressure Injury COVID-19 Patient Experience Research Survey 

A survey has been developed by Janet Kuhnke, Sheila Casemore and Peter Athanasopoulos to look into How is COVID-19 Affecting Access to and the Delivery of Skin and Wound Care Services for Individuals Living with Pressure Injuries and/or Spinal Cord Injury? We are at the stages of inputting the survey questions into the “Hosted in Canada Surveys” platform, which will be ready to be reviewed prior to the distribution of the survey. This initiative will consist of survey collection, data analysis, and follow-up surveys, which will be completed towards the end of this year. 

If you are a health-care provider that works with individuals living with a pressure injury and/or spinal cord, please encourage them to participate in our survey by sharing the survey link with them. Their responses are greatly appreciated and vital to help us better understand how COVID-19 affected their access to receive skin and wound care services! If you are a patient or caregiver with lived experience of pressure injury and/or spinal cord injury, please consider taking a few minutes to answer the survey. It should take 12-15 minutes to complete.

Interprofessional Wound Care Team Competency Framework  

The interprofessional wound care team competency framework consists of several co-investigators and a principal investigator, Dr. Virginie Blanchette. We are working collaboratively to create framework of key competencies that is vital in wound care. We are at the initial stages of this project and have established a working document that is being reviewed and receiving feedback from our skilled group of co-investigators. We hope to create a strong document and begin the Delphi study as our next steps.

 Identifying Wound Care Research Priorities in Canada

Wounds Canada is embarking on a process to identify wound care research priorities, led by Dr. Ahmed Kayssi. The goal is to identify the research priorities that are the most urgent and important for the wound care community by engaging all stakeholders, including patients, caregivers, researchers, and multidisciplinary wound care clinicians in a consensus-building process. The priorities identified can shape the future funding opportunities and advocacy and awareness initiatives that are supported by Wounds Canada.