Improving Wound Healing with Just-In-Time Dietary Education for Patients with Chronic Wounds

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this project was to educate wound care patients from a rural wound care clinic about the importance of diet in healing chronic wounds. The aim of this Doctor of Nursing Practice project was to increase the patients’ knowledge of nutrition and its role in wound healing. Background: Wounds become chronic if after three months the wounds fail to undergo appropriate systematic repair to produce purposeful reparations of the body tissues. Chronic wound patients constitute about 15% of the United States Medicare patients. Chronic wound conditions affect the quality of life of patients and take about $20 billion yearly from the national economy. The healing of wounds is the response of the natural body to an injury to restore the structure and function of the human body. The three primary essentials of wound healing are pressure relief and nursing care; dressings; and nutrition. Nutrition is essential in wound healing with macronutrients and micronutrients playing important roles in wound healing. The role of protein in the provision of the necessary components for tissue growth, cell repair and renewal make protein an essential component in all phases of wound healing. As hospitals and healthcare professionals are considered the primary source of patient education for chronic wound management, it becomes necessary for hospitals to re-evaluate their patient education with emphasis on education delivery methods. In this project, the shift in emphasis was facilitated by the available information that identified Just-in-Time education method as an effective and efficient patient information delivery model. Adopting a Just-in-Time education model will promote the delivery of wound healing information to patients and also emphasize the importance of nutrition to wound healing. The project sought to determine whether using the Just-In-Time Teaching would help increase patient’s understanding of the importance of nutrition to chronic wound healing. The project used pretests and posttests to collect data from 13 chronic patients with chronic wounds in a rural hospital wound care center. The educational intervention was presented in PowerPoint. Results of the analysis show that the patients’ knowledge of the importance of nutrition to wound healing increased following the educational intervention. Method: Patients 30- to 75-years old who have had a chronic wound for more than three months were invited to participate. The Model for Improvement guided this project in delivering the education and evaluating improvement in the nutrition knowledge of the participants using a pretest, educational presentation, and post-test design. The evidence-based educational intervention was created by the student in collaboration with providers at the site. Outcomes Achieved: Data collection was conducted in one week and analyzed with Qualtrics. The analysis showed that there was an increase in the patients' knowledge of the role of nutrition in chronic wound healing as shown in the attached graph and tables. Conclusion: The week-long implementation was successful in increasing nutritional knowledge among the participants. The result of this project provided some significant new information about the importance of education to patients with chronic wounds.