Education

Starting with the Skin: Wound Care Education for Nurse Practitioner Students

By Autumn Henson

As people age, so does the number of chronic illnesses (Levine, 2020). As chronic illnesses increase, many older adults suffer from chronic wounds. Millions of U.S. citizens who received Medicare in 2014 suffered from at least one wound (Nussbaum et al., 2018).

Wound care treatment and management can be very expensive and time-consuming for patients, caregivers, and providers (Nussbaum et al., 2018). However, many primary care providers, including nurse practitioners, are not given a formal education of current best practices for wound care (White-Chu et al., 2019).

In addition, many older adults may have difficulty with transportation or social support needed to visit multiple providers for wound care management and treatment (Sen, 2021).

To support this ongoing issue of chronic wounds with older adults, providers need some formal wound care training which could start in graduate school (Kamath et al., 2019, White-Chu et al., 2019).

Nurse practitioner (NP) educators should be receptive to including education and simulation practice on wound care and management for older adults and wound care should be required content. Only a small number of medical programs are developing or incorporating wound care education in their curricula.

In addition, many graduating NPs, though ideal providers to perform wound care procedures, do not always believe they have the proper wound care knowledge (Schallmo et al., 2019). However, Kamath and colleagues found increased provider education supported basic wound management and prevented rapid decline of the wounds.

Further, common wound care procedures such as incision and drainage and wound debridement are safe practice procedures common for NPs to perform. NP students would benefit from safe, simulated environments to practice these skills before moving forward into their own practice (Wingo & Baker, 2018).

In the adult-gerontological primary care NP program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, curriculum includes multiple modules dedicated to treating and managing skin care issues and injuries commonly seen in primary care settings.

Throughout the 3-year program, students are taught common and atypical skin conditions and injuries they may encounter in practice. During the care and management of the older adult and frail older adults’ course, an entire session is dedicated to skin issues, pressure injuries, vascular wounds, diagnosis, and management related.

In the last year of the program, students experience a hands-on wound care lab of treatment options and procedures including a simulated debridement procedure that NPs can perform in an outpatient primary care setting.

Ensuring a new generation of providers, such as NPs, have the basic knowledge in proper identification, etiology, management, and individualized treatment of chronic wounds could lessen the burden on the healthcare system (Hoversten et al., 2019).

For older adults that could mean decreasing stressors and improving primary care provider and chronic wound management. The skin is the first line of defense in health. Wound care management and treatment do not always mean a referral to a specialist.

Primary care NPs may be a valuable treatment option.

Autumn Henson, DNP, GNP-BC, WCC
aenhenson@gmail.com