Brianna Guillory has worked in home health care for several of her 10 years as a licensed vocational nurse. Since the start of the pandemic, she’s noticed a major uptick in nurses leaving hospitals and joining her field.
The problem, she told FOX 26 in Houston, was that many of them weren’t given the right resources to treat critical wounds.
“There’s too many patients, not enough hospital beds and so there are nurses that are leaving the hospital,” Guillory said.
She said nurses usually have to have one to two years of experience to work in home health care, but high demand and the nursing shortage means nurses are being accepted right out of nursing school.
Because of this inexeperience, young nurses often don’t know the best ways to treat pressure sores, ulcers and post-surgical wounds. So Guillory started Divine Healthcare Consultants, which specializes in virtual wound care consulting. She also helped to create an app that provides virtual wound care services for both the nurse and the patient.
“They’ll be able to use that to capture the wound image and send that to our certified wound specialist, and we’re able to come up with a treatment plan for that patient’s wound,” Guillory said. The app “also measures wounds, and if they need to schedule a virtual visit they can, and that’s just if the wound is deteriorating if they need a little more one-on-one teaching.”
Why is this important?
“If we have a patient that has a wound that’s at home, and if we can stop that patient from going to the ER, then at that point we’re reducing the hospitalization rate,” she explained.
Guillory told FOX 26 she’s proud to be a Black woman blazing the trail in virtual wound care.
“You must be twice as hard, twice as ambitious just to be able to get there. Twice as resourceful just to show you’re capable of a seat at the table, but it’s just more motivation to keep pushing on.” she said.
Guillory is looking to hire new wound care specialists. If you’d like to learn more about job opportunities or about her wound care consulting services, click here https://divinehealthcarellc.com.
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