The National Catheter Education Programme is a Health Education England-funded initiative to improve the care of patients with catheters. Part of this initiative is the Secret Life of Catheters programme. This article highlights the need for improvement in catheter care and explains the development of this project, which aims to drive improvements across primary and secondary settings through the large-scale delivery of a multiprofessional educational programme in catheter care. The programme explores key dilemmas that district nurses, community nurses, healthcare assistants and doctors can encounter with catheters, and provides approaches to address them. By standardising the teaching of clinical concepts and practice strategies, it is hoped that variations in practice and pockets of misunderstanding can be eliminated.
People with leg ulceration are predominantly treated in a community setting either in their own home, a clinic or a general practice surgery. Access to high quality, effective care is vital for timely healing. This article will consider aspects of the National Health Service quality agenda and how these align to leg ulcer care using national venous leg ulcer guidelines as a framework. The purpose of this is to prompt both practitioners and managers to consider the current provision of leg ulcer care and how this might stand up to scrutiny from a quality perspective.
Irene Anderson reader in Learning and Teaching in Healthcare Practice, and Programme Tutor, Tissue Viability, University of Hertfordshire.
Article accepted for publication: May 2012
