Leg Club Industry Partners: The importance of education

I think one of the really key things is that the leg club has a common interest in areas which us as industry partners are also interested in so for me I'm a therapy area manager and one of my key therapy areas is chronic venous disease which encapsulates leg ulcers. So from an educational perspective what the leg club do and what BSN are trying to achieve and the other industry partners is pretty aligned so it's a really really good approach from the industry partners and also the leg club and I find that you know the collaborative working is really really good. We have a journal called the community wound care supplement and the community wound care supplement is distributed to the leg clubs and the nurses who manage the leg clubs so they can keep up to date with best practice. It's also a vehicle to educate district and community nurses, the wider community of nurses about what leg clubs do, how to get involved with them. There's quite a lot of need for education out there with the nurses. There's such a complex choice of bandaging and dressing and treatment for leg ulcers, so we feel as partners that we can support them with any of the training aspects of measuring fitting for hosiery or bandage applications and things like that. Methods of treatment are changing, technology is changing, so it's only right they get kept up to date with the latest things that are going on in terms of treatment, but also delivering the education needs to change too because time is of an essence for the nurses, so we as an industry have to look at the way we deliver our education to them. And the use of social media is becoming a big part of that education program and the nurses are relating to that and they can do it alongside their work when they can or equally in their own time.