NPWT Patient Healing Success Starts With Proper Equipment Training

Through diligent and ongoing negative pressure wound therapy equipment training, clinicians can be better informed with resources and tools to successfully heal their patients.

Negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) is a relatively new and adaptive treatment for many acute and chronic wounds. This therapy is in its infancy stage and has significant potential for innovation and growth. The initial development of NPWT came to fruition in the early 1990s, although its roots date back to the earliest civilizations.

Because NPWT is recent to modern medicine and health technology, the education and training of it has immense opportunity to develop and evolve. NPWT is transitioning into a therapy with many more applications than how it’s typically been used.

Historically and traditionally, NPWT has been a reactive therapy. My vision is that this can be a preventative solution and can be used proactively for wound care. For our industry to fully optimize this therapy for patient care and healing, there needs to be a hyper-focus on NPWT wound care education.

Effective NPWT Starts With Proactive Education

NPWT product training is essential to patient healing success. With proactive education and training, clinicians can be less burdened with figuring out how to use the product. It is important to follow the medical guidelines on healing acute and chronic wounds, but durable medical equipment providers (DMEs) have an opportunity to take it a step further and provide extensive and ongoing training for the facilities they serve.

Because NPWT is in its infancy stage, the evolution of newer and more up-to-date equipment makes it challenging for clinicians using the products, especially if there is a lack of training and understanding of that new product.

For DMEs, there needs to be more or equal emphasis on NPWT equipment training as there is on sales. Medical device representatives should be accountable for ongoing product training within each facility they serve. Dealers should ask themselves: how can we enhance our protocol on training? How often do we ask our reps to retrain? Are the clinicians we serve fully confident and knowledgeable on our products? What more can we do to ensure our clinicians and their patients’ have a less cumbersome experience?

Solutions To Improve NPWT Equipment Training

There is an abundance of solutions we can implement as an industry to address the lack of wound care education training. The first is simple—continuous and streamlined education efforts from dealers to clinicians and patients.

Additionally, our team has seen the most success and better outcomes when dealers have clinical staff follow-up with the facilities they serve. Clinician-to-clinician communication can be very effective. Dealers should have access to a clinician who is certified in wound care and can help address questions and issues that arise from facilities based on their patients’ distinct needs.

My team and I strongly value the importance of assisting our DMEs on continuous product training and updates so that they can best serve their clinicians and patients. Our goal is to provide them with a simplistic and streamlined approach to NPWT equipment training so that the patient has the best outcome. 

Collectively as an industry, we all need to focus on offering more education product training. In doing so, we can catapult the growth and success of this budding therapy and optimize the patient healing experience for decades to come.

Gary Schear is the Vice President of Sales for ExtriCARE USA, a national medical device distribution company specializing in negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT). He has over 30 years of industry experience, with a robust background in durable medical equipment (DME), home healthcare and medical equipment manufacturing. To learn more, visit www.extricareusa.com.

Blog provided by: ExtriCARE

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