Skin Care Resource Teams: Successful Strategies to Implement Evidence-Based Practice

Quality, cost, and patient access are critical to a home health care agency's success in a competitive market. Creating a learning environment is key to both staff satisfaction and positive patient care outcomes. Preventing adverse events and providing evidence-based care management for high-volume populations are key to an agency's reputation for quality, cost-efficient care. This article describes the implementation of evidence-based guidelines for pressure ulcer prevention and wound care utilizing the continuous quality improvement process in performance improvement (PI) via Skin Care Resource Team (SCRT) implementation. Factors addressed are clinical quality, cost, staff motivation, productivity, and documentation burden. Effective and efficient strategies described in PI are SCRT support and rollout and integration of consistent appropriate wound, ostomy, and continence nurse consults via telehealth. The importance of linking evidence-based practice with the agency's vision, goals, resources, and employee incentives is discussed.