The Wound Care Alliance UK (WCAUK) annual conference is being held at Gloucester Rugby Club on Wednesday 10 May 2023. For more details and to book your place, please see the advert in this journal or visit the WCAUK website (https://www.wcauk.org).
Following feedback from WCAUK members, we are launching a series of webinars in conjunction with Mark Allen Healthcare (this journal's publisher). They will focus on the areas you requested, including pressure ulcer care, foot care and lower limb care. Following an unavoidable delay, for which we apologise, these will be held on 27, 28, 29 and 30 March. Please register and join us for these webinars, where the WCAUK trustees will share their expertise. Please see the WCAUK advert in this journal.
One of the members of the WCAUK, Susy Pramod, Lead Tissue Viability Nurse at the Christie Hospital in Manchester, is a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Manchester. She is conducting an online survey aimed at nurses who deliver wound care in the NHS. The survey aims to explore who delivers care for people with malignant fungating wounds to find out more about their roles, the care they deliver and perceived barriers and facilitators to delivering this type of wound care. It is an anonymous survey, and your answers will help to find out more about the care of people with malignant fungating wounds so we can target future research in this field.
The survey, which takes 10 minutes to complete, can be accessed via: https://www.qualtrics.manchester.ac.uk/jfe/form/SV_bvfpXKI1S4gt26y
Members of the WCAUK often ask me for more information on aspects of wound care and I want to recommend the National Wound Care Strategy Programme website (https://www.nationalwoundcarestrategy.net/), which has a number of resources that are available to download and use. These include information on pressure ulcers, the lower limb, surgical wounds, digital data and information, education and workforce, shared care, and the supply and distribution of woundcare products. I will be highlighting online resources at our conference.
The Royal College of Nursing members on NHS Agenda for Change contracts voted to take strike action and we have already seen several 12-hour walk-outs. After around 10 weeks of striking there has been no real progression on pay or working conditions. The action is set to escalate to 48-hour strikes in England, with limited provisions for the most urgent cases, which is part of the legal obligation not to endanger life. The Welsh and Scottish governments are in discussion. The Health Secretary has been urged to begin pay discussions by NHS chiefs to avert the next planned strikes (Blakeley, 2023).
For many of us this is of great concern and the cancellation of 137 000 appointments so far is a significant number, with a major impact on people's lives, and I include my own family in this.
A long-running dispute over poor customs checks has led the UK to paying a fine of more than £2.2 billion to Brussels which, The Times has reported, would be enough for a 3.3 % pay rise (Wright, 2023).
Although a pay rise has been viewed by the members as important, I believe a significant change in culture is also needed. Alongside the pay rise, there is an urgent need for a cultural change that focuses on the best services to every patient. That leads me back to tissue viability and the importance of a national strategy and getting it right for patients first time every time. The opportunity to be informed in care provision is important but so is the infrastructure to support nurses to implement and evaluate best practices. I look forward to a time when I am no longer aware of the large variances in care or asked to offer advice to patients, relatives and carers on ensuring their care follows a structured pathway with positive outcomes.
I look forward to an end to the current disputes and to seeing you on 10 May at the WCAUK conference.