Wound Care Treatment – The Importance Of Collaboration
Wound Care Treatment – The Importance Of Collaboration
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Often when patients come in for chronic wound care treatment, the wound is not the only issue they need to address. An entire host of complications can cause a wound, which means patients need several medical professionals working together to understand how to treat the underlying condition that prevents a wound to heal completely.
Through interdisciplinary collaboration, doctors formulate a comprehensive treatment plan to help their patients heal as quickly as possible.
What Is Collaborative Treatment?
Collaborative treatment in wound care involves a team of doctors with different specialties working together to treat patients comprehensively and address their full medical needs.
Doctors can avoid patient limb amputation and lengthy recovery times when they begin a comprehensive care plan in collaboration with other involved medical professionals. For instance, treating a diabetic foot ulcer involves taking into account a variety of factors such as debridement, ankle stabilization/offloading, and managing diabetes itself. One doctor alone could not treat every aspect of this patient’s needs.
Each doctor in a patient’s medical team brings a different area of expertise to the table; they must be informed about what the other doctors are doing to treat their patients. This allows them to respond and assist the team with the necessary information and skills to ensure the highest quality of care for their patients.
Understanding The Silo Mentality
In hospitals and medical facilities, the resistance to sharing information across disparate branches is known as the silo mentality. This often occurs on a broad level when different sectors of care, such as outpatient, inpatient, acute, and rehabilitation care, struggle to bridge divides between their branches and work together.
This lack of communication means that doctors treating patients for wounds may not understand the medical journey that led a patient to that point or the journey that the patient will undergo afterward. The results of the silo mentality include higher costs for patient care, redundancy in treatment, and lower quality of care.
To combat the silo mentality, hospitals must focus on integrating a collaborative system into their organizational structure. According to Debra Miller-Cox, MD, who has studied silo mentality, there are six steps that medical facilities can take to incorporate collaborative treatment into their healthcare administration.
- Identify Your Leaders
- Identify Departments Providing Wound Care
- Create Provider Partnerships
- Allow Administrative Structure To Develop
- Bringing Components Together
- Evaluate Communication
These steps outline a plan for hospitals to unite the fragmented pieces of their current organization network to benefit both patients and doctors.
Implementing a formal, comprehensive wound care service line has been found to bring down costs as well as reduce the rate of limb amputations. Another route to creating a better system involves bringing in a specialized wound care management company to assist hospitals with increased efficiencies, patient satisfaction, quality improvements, and resource management.
Integrating New Treatment Modalities
Adding collaborative care treatment to your hospital enables you to have a team that is dedicated to considering advanced modalities as deemed medically necessary. One of these advanced modalities is Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment (HBOT). Doctors may use this therapy to address wounds that have not responded to traditional treatment.
By exposing the wound to 100% pure oxygen in a pressurized chamber, HBOT is designed to address the unique needs of patients with problem-wounds and other non-healing conditions, capitalizing on the body’s need for oxygen in order to heal itself. This safe medical treatment has been shown to aid in the recovery of wounds and other conditions that fail to heal, despite standard medical care. HBOT and other advanced modalities and collaborative care plans utilized appropriately, provide an enhanced care experience and outcomes for patients.
Bringing In Outside Help
If you are looking to improve your hospital’s capacity to serve and treat patients with wounds, consider adding CūtisCare as your wound care management partner. CūtisCare specializes in collaborative wound care treatment for a variety of issues, ranging from ulcers to burns. By collaborating across fields, doctors can most effectively treat their patients, and CūtisCare provides flexible, customized healthcare solutions for wound care and hyperbaric medicine service lines.