Mental health nurses and wound care. Need for training?

[22kelsey22]

Hello all you psych/mental health nurses out there! I am a MSN-candidate student working on a proposed thesis/scholarly project and I am interested in your input! If I get a lot of feedback, I may try to set up an anonymous study if you would all be so kind to fill it out!

What I am wondering is this:

Do you find yourself doing much wound care as a psych nurse? BY "wound" I mean, pressure ulcers, self-harm, abscesses, lacerations, burns, foot ulcerations, etc.

Have you done much training for wound care or has it been mostly from school or other nurses?

Do you feel confident in your wound care skills?

Do you wish you were trained more often/more thoroughly on wound care?

Do you feel that psych care trumps physical care, like wound management, in most cases?

There has been a lot of research published on this in the UK but nothing/very little that I can find in the US.

You input is MUCH appreciated!

[MedChica]

Do you find yourself doing much wound care as a psych nurse? BY "wound" I mean, pressure ulcers, self-harm, abscesses, lacerations, burns, foot ulcerations, etc.

- We perform lots of wound care. We don't have much in the way of bed ulcers, although they come about occasionally.

Have you done much training for wound care or has it been mostly from school or other nurses?

- I wasn't much trained for wound care. then again, I wasn't trained much for the floor, so...

Do you feel confident in your wound care skills?

- I could be better. I don't primarly do wound care. If every nurse did the wound care for their residents, we'd never sit down. The charge does the wound care.

Do you wish you were trained more often/more thoroughly on wound care?

- Yes. We do attend workshops but I haven't been to any.

Do you feel that psych care trumps physical care, like wound management, in most cases?

- Nothing trumps anything. Behavior and boundary setting is more of a round-the-clock affair. We clean and tend to wounds as they arise and on schedule.

We manage their ability to cope and their physical ailments.

Our residents/pts have DM, CHF, respiratory issues, too....

They're sick like everyone else. Their illness just extends to the mind.

[devonette]

i definitely need wound care training, i have to dress and clean self harm wounds regularly and have really no idea what i am doing but remember from nursing school (the one hour class is all we got) that if you get it wrong you can make things worse, also i would like to be able to advise patients how to care for their own wounds and know that I'm telling them the right thing..I've thought this for a while...we 100% definitely need wound care training...

[TerpGal02, ASN]

We def do wound care at our agency (community psych) even though we aren't really set up for it. If client has their own supplies we will do it as we don't really keep any wound care supplies. I don't think I've ever done wound care on an acute wound like self injury or anything. I have dealt with some awesome chronic wounds. We have lots of non compliant DM and PAD clients. One with terrible cellulitis from the ankle halfway up the calf that is constantly draining copious serious fluid. She has lipedema in the legs bilaterally as well. Thcare en we have a PAD client who almost lost a few toes. He was blocked as far up as the internal illiac arteries. Both these people of course are followed by wound care but need dressing changes every few days. I am mostly going on my nursing school knowledge which is fairly fresh, I graduated a year ago. I would love more wound care training. I love wounds. The grosser the better.

[kma27]

As a RMN working with elderly patients on an acute admissions ward wound care is part of our daily routine on many occassions! However the training we recieve is non existant and we hav to rely on each other for advise when dressing different wounds! Although we do have good links with the tissue viability nurses who are always at the end of the phone for advise! But yes as an RMN i would definitly agree we have limited training in wound care as part of our training and once we qualifiy!

[Whispera, MSN, RN]

Do you find yourself doing much wound care as a psych nurse? BY "wound" I mean, pressure ulcers, self-harm, abscesses, lacerations, burns, foot ulcerations, etc. mostly wounds from self-harm, although in patients with Alzheimer's sometimes care to pressure ulcers is required

Have you done much training for wound care or has it been mostly from school or other nurses? training in school (a little) and on-the-job from other nurses and a wound care specialist

Do you feel confident in your wound care skills? since we had an on-call wound specialist, things were ok

Do you wish you were trained more often/more thoroughly on wound care? it never came to mind but now that you mention it...

Do you feel that psych care trumps physical care, like wound management, in most cases? I'm not sure what you mean by this, but wound management is part of psych care and very important to any patient, psych or not.