Highly commended
The Wound Care Programme that Turned Patients into Partners... With a 98% Success Rate and 59% Fewer Nurse Visits
Summary of work
Nearly 4 million people in the UK live with a wound annually, yet over half of all nurse visits to change dressings are clinically unnecessary. With workforce shortages reaching crisis point, Smith+Nephew needed a different approach. Not just fewer visits, but a genuine shift in who owns the care, which actually gets adopted.
Together, we built a shared care model that repositioned patients as active participants in their own recovery. Where previous attempts had focused on reducing visits as the end goal, we focused on empowerment: using behavioural science to understand why patients and clinicians were resistant to change, and designing tools that directly addressed the barriers.
A dual approach, including an advisory board with Tissue Viability Nurses (TVNs) and a patient focus group identified the core obstacles: low clinician confidence, insufficient guidance, and patients who didn't feel equipped. From this, we developed both a professional and a patient toolkit around the ALLEVYN LIFE dressing with change indicator, purpose-built to make self-management feel safe and achievable.
Piloted across three sites, the results were transformational: a 59% reduction in nurse visits and a 98% patient success rate - real-world proof that behavioural insight, applied correctly, can transform care delivery at scale.
Judges’ comments
This was a very strong entry from EatMoreFruit and Smith+Nephew, it felt like it had actually been built around behavioural model strategies. It had good insights, was a long term programme, so change over time was easier to see. It was a pilot at time of entry, but the results were impressive.
