Abstract

GASPAR, Pedro João Soares et al. Impact of continuing professional education on treatment costs for chronic wounds. Rev. Enf. Ref. [online]. 2010, vol.serIII, n.1, pp.53-62. ISSN 0874-0283.

In health care provision, scientific and technological advances rapidly make specific skills acquired at school totally obsolete. Clinical errors, bad practices and inadequate performances frequently attributed to insufficient training bring a tremendous economic load to health costs. In investing in training, rather than knowing how much will be spent, we need to know how much we can save by making healthcare providers more skilled. Our general aim was to develop a model to estimate the costs of non-training. We built and validated (1) virtual clinical cases of patients with chronic wounds, (2) a mathematical model to estimate Optimal Costs (based on optimal clinical decisions), and (3) a decision-making simulator to prepare Cost of Action matrices (based on the treatment decisions recorded in the simulator). We developed a cross-sectional study, using a non-random cohort of 78 nurses with different levels of specific training and experience in the diagnosis and treatment of chronic wounds. The outcomes provided us with the empirical knowledge that the costs involved in the treatment are higher among healthcare providers who have not attended specific accredited training, and that the costs are likely to fall as the number of training hours increases.

Keywords : costs; non-training; chronic wounds; virtual clinical cases.

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