Nutritional intake can have an effect on many areas of a patient’s health, while malnutrition specifically has a recognised role in pressure ulcer development. In this article, the author looks at whether there is any high quality evidence to recommend specific nutritional measures when trying to prevent pressure ulcers, as well as looking at overall recommendations for malnourished patients. Nutritional screening remains essential to help identify those patients most at risk of malnutrition and allows community nurses to prepare nutritional care plans and begin to correct any nutritional deficiencies. The author recommends that community nurses perform nutritional screening at any patient contact, be that in hospital, nursing home or in the patient’s
own home. Recording the outcome of screening at regular intervals also helps to identify trends in a patient’s nutritional state and means that any reduction will be picked up quickly.
Community nurses often have very busy caseloads and need a wide variety of knowledge to deal with the many different clinical scenarios that they face. This is particularly true of wound care, which can present a unique set of challenges, including infection, how to control exudate and making sure that any dressing they have chosen does not actually further harm the patient by, for example, damaging the skin when it is removed. This article outlines some of the most important areas that community nurses need to understand when it comes to wound care before going on to look at the solutions provided by one particular dressing (Actilite Protect®; Advancis Medical), which is designed for use on the full range of wounds, including acute skin tears, post-surgical wounds, chronic leg ulcers, pressure ulcers, diabetic ulcers and infected wounds. As well as presenting an overview of the dressing, this article also presents a series of case studies that illustrate the benefits of the dressing in practice.
