21 August 2024

Guest Blog

National Wound Care Strategy Programme: Enhancing Consistency with GMDN for Wound Management Products

The Global Medical Device Nomenclature (GMDN) is an internationally recognised system that ensures medical devices are categorised uniformly. This global standardisation facilitates the identification and sharing of issues related to medical devices across countries, ensuring consistency and enhancing safety.

The National Wound Care Strategy Programme (NWCSP) was commissioned by NHS England and has developed from several previous initiatives which addressed the issue of sub-optimal wound care. Evidence points to marked unwarranted variation in UK wound care services, underuse of evidence-based practices and overuse of ineffective practices.

This offers major opportunities to improve the quality of chronic wound care through innovative solutions that will improve wound healing, prevent harm, increase productivity of staff, and produce financial savings in line with the requirements of the recent NHS Long Term Plan.

The vision of the NWCSP is to develop recommendations which support excellence in preventing, assessing, and treating people with wounds to optimise healing and minimise the burden of wounds for patients, carers and health and care providers. The NWCSP was noted in the NHS Long Term Plan and in the National Patient Safety Strategy.

Classification Development

Over the past 2 years, The National Wound Care Strategy Programme (NWCSP) has been working on the development of a new wound product classification system and a comprehensive repository of wound management products, drawing on data provided by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the Drug Tariff, and NHS Supply Chain. NWCSP has worked with clinicians, suppliers of wound management products, the GMDN Agency and those involved in the procurement of these products to ensure that the classification system can be used to systematically name, code and group products in a consistent way.

Enhancing Clinical Comparability

The NWCSP has worked to align groupings of wound management products to the high-level GMDN coding. By adding further differentiation, the NWCSP has established clinically comparable groups of products, ensuring precise categorisation by using clinical, technical and coding attributes to group products appropriately.

Ongoing Collaboration and Future Directions

The NWCSP and the GMDN Agency continue to review and refine the coding, terms, and definitions applicable to wound management products. This ongoing review aims to identify potential areas for improvements, ensuring that the GMDN codes, terms and definitions for wound management products remain current and effective.

By maintaining a clear and uniform system for categorising wound management products, the healthcare community can better address and manage issues, leading to higher standards of care and safety.

Dr Barry Daniels, Senior Clinical Lead at the GMDN Agency, has been leading the GMDN implementation on the NWCSP.

He said: “Our involvement with the NWCSP is very important as it is one of the first clinically orientated implementations of the categorisation functionality in the Global Medical Device Nomenclature, applied to data captured from multiple sources including Regulatory and Health Service. The GMDN is seen as an internationally-accepted standard that can be used as a basis for a more granular clinically-relevant level of classification. The ongoing collaboration is providing very useful feedback into the GMDN Term development process to improve the utility and effectiveness of the Global Medical Device Nomenclature.”

For more details on the GMDN implementation and the ongoing efforts of the NWCSP, please refer to the GMDN and NWCSP websites.