Opportunity/Gap: Community-based wound care for people experiencing homelessness, mental health challenges, and substance use presents a major operational challenge for Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH). Chronic wounds linked to trauma, injection drug use, malnutrition, and housing instability, are common. Many wounds lead to preventable complications and avoidable emergency department visits when patients are lost to follow-up. Wound care services are provided in a wide range of settings, including primary care, home health, outpatient IV treatment clinics, acute care, supported housing and outreach teams, making coordination a challenge. Important questions exist around optimal treatment selection, service design and placement, and patient care models. Our team is developing a mixed-methods simulation modelling and health economic analysis to address this gap, but building models that reflect operational reality and centre the lived experience of patients requires sustained engagement with frontline staff and patient partners.
Format: Six 1-hour engagement sessions with VCH frontline wound care staff (4 sessions) and patients who use or have used wound care services (2 sessions).
Participants: 10-12 per session.
Frontline staff sessions: Frontline nursing and clinical staff (4), Clinic/service manager/leader (2), VCH operations director (1), Researchers (2), Trainees (2), Facilitator (1).
Patient sessions: Patient partners (4), VCH operations director (1), Researchers (2), Trainees (2), Facilitator (1).
EDI considerations: To support accessibility, sessions will be held at participants’ usual VCH healthcare site. Pre-event meetings with patient partners will be offered to prepare them for the session. Sessions are designed for small groups to support open discussion, with trauma-informed facilitation throughout.
Anticipated outcomes: (1) A shared understanding of current wound care delivery from the frontline perspective, including service gaps, barriers to follow-up, and resource bottlenecks, to identify priorities for research (2) A set of patient-identified priorities, barriers to care access, and treatment preferences, centering the lived experience of a marginalized population in the research agenda. (3) Strengthened relationships between SFU researchers, patient partners, and VCH wound care programs that will support ongoing research and quality improvement.
Additional team members and participating organizations:
Nicholas Salterio, Alexander Rutherford, Jacob Umbach, Rachel Nicoletti, Christina Hagner, Paige Knorr, Krisztina Vasarhelyi, Cass Djurfors