New wound certification to make debut next fall
With increasing emphasis on competency testing from accrediting organizations, home care providers might want to take note of a pending change in the certification program from the American Academy of Wound Management. According to Mike Freedman, administrative manager of the Miami-based academy, a new certification program will be field tested in the spring of 1999 and rolled out in the fall.
What does the new certification mean to your hospital-affiliated organization? Freedman says that rather than relying on subjective criteria such as copies of licenses, certifications, and resumes submitted by candidates for Diplomate, Fellow, or Clinical Associate levels of certification, the new program will be based on a single test of knowledge on wound care issues.
That test is being developed now by Lisa Ovington, PhD, CWS, a leader in wound care research. It will be given to a representative sample of current certified wound specialists in April. Freedman says their role will be to determine the relevancy of the questions and come up with a scoring curve that will determine CWS levels in the future.
Currently, candidates with terminal degrees, such as MDs, DOs, or medically relevant PhDs, are eligible for a Diplomate level certification. Candidates with master's degrees get fellowships. Clinical associates are given to others with at least five years of wound care experience who the credentialing committee feel meet the academy standards.
Freedman says that hospital-affiliated home care agencies are always looking for new ways to ascertain the quality of their staff, and the wound care certification will be another way to do that. But there are also more concrete benefits to making sure your caregivers are certified. He has heard of agencies getting less expensive liability insurance by having credentialed staff.
His own experience working in subacute care programs proved to Freedman that the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) in Oakbrook Terrace, IL, appreciated the credentialing. "A key issue for [JCAHO] is multidisciplinary teams, but they don't have guidelines for evaluating whether a team member can serve the patients," he says. "This is one way to show that you have the experience. This is a test of competency Joint Commission surveyors will appreciate."
For more information on the credentialing program, contact the Academy at (305) 866-9592.
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