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Presentation Description
Institution: Northern Health - Victoria, Australia
The Podiatry team at Northern Health (NH) play a leading role in assessing the overall foot health of all patients at NH. This includes dermatological, neurological and arterial assessments, which provide key information for decision making on hospital admission and discharge when liaising with medical and allied health teams. These assessments are completed across both inpatient and outpatient services. NH Podiatry service patients in the Hume and wider catchment areas. Often NH Podiatry encounter patients from regional and complex socio-economic communities; highlighting the need for delivering targeted patient centred care that is in line with patients’ goals of care. Patients referred with tissue loss can include diabetes related foot ulcerations, chronic, ischaemic and pressure ulcers. The Foot Procedure Unit (FPU) is a National Association of Diabetes Centres (NADC) accredited core high-risk foot service focused on patients requiring the assessment, diagnosis and management of complex foot disease through a day admission. FPU also services specialist and allied health outpatient clinics such as Vascular, Orthopaedic and Infectious Diseases (ID). NH Podiatry is working towards becoming a centre of excellence with feedback to showcase Endocrinology involvement in inpatient and FPU services as well as contribution to a national Redcaps dataset for Diabetes related foot admissions. NH podiatry and vascular are also in the early stages of trialling an inpatient Diabetic Foot Round (DFR) in partnership with ID and Endocrinology. Podiatry at NH are at the forefront of research and quality improvement, practices are endorsed by strong evidence-based guidelines from The International Working Group on The Diabetic Foot 2023. Podiatry have recently purchased a Transcutaneous Oxygen Pressure (TCP02) device and is being trialled in a research study to evaluate perfusion measures to further support Vascular intervention decision making and therapy.