Managing complex palliative wounds: an interactive educational approach for district nurses

Complex palliative wounds, although uncommon, are extremely distressing for patients because of their associated symptoms. Managing these symptoms presents significant challenges to clinicians. As the majority of these patients will be managed at home, district nurses will be the main providers of care. The quality of the literature in this field is limited due to the small number of patients presenting with these wounds and the difficulties associated with researching issues within palliative care. However, the literature available identifies that community nurses would value greater education in managing these wounds because the accepted wound healing theories and management strategies do not apply. This underpins the rationale for developing an educational resource to provide district nurses with current, evidence-based information to support their wound-management decisions in caring for this patient group. This paper reports the development, through an action research work-based project, of such an interactive educational package.