A health organisation covering Great Yarmouth and Waveney is rolling out a care home scheme to treat residents’s skin tears.

East Coast Community Healthcare (ECCH) Tissue Viability Team has been working with three care homes in the borough to help care home staff correctly diagnose skin tears and dress them appropriately in order to improve a patient’s chances of a swift recovery.

The pilot scheme came as a result of ECCH’s district nurses experiencing a high number of requests for visits to care home residents with skin tears that turned out to be wrongly diagnosed or incorrectly dressed.

Staff at three care homes in Great Yarmouth received special training from ECCH and piloted the new system for a three month period.

The results showed a reduction in skin tears, improved healing rates and reduced pain and trauma for residents because appropriate first dressings had been applied.

The education package and treatment pathway is now being rolled out to all care homes in Great Yarmouth and Waveney.

In an added boost to ECCH, NHS England has asked the Tissue Viability Team to submit its findings as part of the national Leading Change, Adding Value initiative which aims to highlight practices that have resulted in better outcomes, improved experiences and better use of resources in order that all NHS organisations can learn from them.

ECCH tissue viability nurse specialist Jayne Jode said: “The work we have done so far in Great Yarmouth care homes has had significant benefits and we’re delighted that this has been recognised by NHS England as a case of best practice.

“We pride ourselves on offering a high quality service but we’re always looking for chances to improve the way we do things in order to make life better for our patients.”

The team has also carried out an information day at Great Yarmouth’s King Centre in which invited carers and healthcare workers found out more about how to prevent pressure ulcers occurring and treat them effectively. The event also involved tissue viability nurse from the James Paget University Hospital.

ECCH Services include district nursing, health visiting, community in-patient services, GP surgeries and physiotherapy.