Wound Care Practitioner
Job Description
Job summary
This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced nurse to take on a leadership role within Adult Community Services. As a Band 7 Wound Care Practitioner, you would lead wound care within our community services, ensuring that patients receive expert, evidence-based care in their own homes. Working alongside district nursing teams, you will provide specialist assessment, advanced wound management, and guidance on complex wounds such as pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers, and leg ulcers.
If you're ready to take the next step in your nursing career and have a passion for driving excellence in catheter care, we'd love to hear from you!
Main duties of the job
Expert Wound Care: Provide specialist wound assessment and management to patients in their homes, ensuring high-quality, evidence-based interventions.
Education & Training: Lead on training initiatives for community healthcare staff, upskilling teams in wound prevention, assessment, and management.
Audits & Quality Monitoring: Conduct audits on wound care practices, identifying trends and using data to drive improvements in patient outcomes.
Quality Improvement & Research: Lead on service improvement projects, ensuring that wound care practices align with the latest research and best evidence.
Collaboration with Specialist Teams: Work closely with Tissue Viability, Podiatry, Vascular, and Infection Control teams to ensure holistic and coordinated patient care.
Please see the attached job description for the main duties and responsibilities of the role.
About us
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust is a community focused provider of local and acute care, providing high quality services to over one million people living across the London boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley. With a turnover of around £700 million, we provide services at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, University Hospital Lewisham and a range of community settings in Lewisham. We also provide some services at Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup.
As an organisation, we've made significant improvements for patients and staff in the last two and-a-half years. This is reflected in our most recent Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection (from February 2020), which found improvements across the organisation and gave us an improved rating of "Good" in the Well-Led and Effective domains, in addition to the rating of "Good" that we had already achieved in the Caring domain. Our staff culture change programme has been key to the Trust's improvement journey, as we've stabilised our workforce by reducing vacancy rates and improving staff retention. We've also significantly increased the representation of minority ethnic leaders across our clinical and corporate teams.
Job responsibilities
To assess, plan, deliver, monitor and evaluate care of patients with complex tissue viability needs.
To be a resource for all nurses, staff, patients and carers on up-to-date wound care.
To take lead managerial responsibility under the direction of the Neighbourhood Nurse Manager.
To respond to referrals, enquiries and requests as required.
To develop and lead a team of wound care link nurses in all appropriate clinical areas.
To develop a robust method of documenting status of pressure ulcers present on admission or discharge, including appropriate use of photographic evidence
To maintain accurate, contemporaneous records and return statistics as required.
To advise the services on the provision / purchasing of equipment for patients
To maintain an expert clinical knowledge of wound care, own level of clinical competence and be responsible for own continuing professional development.
To participate in standard setting, benchmarking and clinical audit, participating in research projects and audits
Please see the attached job description for the main duties and responsibilities of the role.
Person Specification
Personal Qualities
Essential
- Demonstrates sound level of knowledge, which enables comprehension at a deeper level of understanding about the anatomical and physiological influences on Tissue Viability.
- Ability to demonstrate the leadership skills required maintaining the focus and direction of teamwork.
- Excellent interpersonal skills.
- Ability to work under pressure, use initiative and be flexible to the changing demands of the workload.
- Ability to demonstrate a positive, caring and patient centred approach to all patients.
- To be punctual for work and and adhere to the Trust's uniform policy.To be a role model and be resilient.
- To be flexible and approachable
Knowledge and Skills
Essential
- Excellent organisational skills with the ability to supervise and motivate self and others.
- Ability to prioritise and work to deadlines.
- Able to chair team meetings and deputise as delegated.
- Ability to contribute to and develop new approaches in Tissue Viability within nursing.
- Excellent knowledge of tissue viability research and practice.
- Ability to write reports and work with others to develop and write protocols and guidelines.
- Able to lead benchmarking activities, collecting data, carrying out audits and sharing out best practice across the Trust.
- Awareness of current advances/trends within Tissue Viability and education.
Experience
Essential
- Extensive post registration experience
- Experience of working as a team leader in direct supervision of qualified and unqualified staff. Ability to manage staff, and difficult situations.
- Experience of managing Tissue Viability patients, working with professionals from other disciplines.
- Experience of teaching and assessing
- Evidence of innovative practice.
- Experience of using appropriate clinical assessment tools.
- To have an understanding of current issues, policies and frameworks and how they affect nursing services.
- Experience of the applying all aspect of care.
Qualifications and Training
Essential
- First level registration
- Educated to 1st degree level or equivalent
- Tissue Viability accredited Course Such as ENB N49 / a degree level university programme or equivalent)
- Teaching and Assessing/Mentorship qualification Evidence of continuing professional development
Desirable
- Extended Prescribing Leg Ulcer Management
Disclosure and Barring Service Check
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
Certificate of Sponsorship
Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website (Opens in a new tab).
From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants (Opens in a new tab).
UK Registration
Applicants must have current UK professional registration. For further information please see NHS Careers website (opens in a new window).
Employer details
Employer name
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust
Address
University Hospital Lewisham Adult community services sites
Lewisham High Street
London
SE13 6LH
Employer's website
https://www.lewishamandgreenwich.nhs.uk/ (Opens in a new tab)
