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Natalie is nominated for being “a hard-working, modest and truly professional nurse” whose wound care skills and leadership are making a difference to both the patients she cares for and the nursing colleagues she supports in building their own clinical skills.

NAME: Natalie Scot
DHB: Capital & Coast
JOB: Clinical nurse specialist, wound care

Patients previously nursed in hospital beds are now regularly supported at home due to the expert assistance Natalie Scott provides both the patient and her nursing colleagues.

Natalie is a clinical nurse specialist for wound care with Capital & Coast’s district nursing service and supports the development and improvement of wound care practice for her 60 district nursing colleagues, many aged residential care nurses and other nurses in the community sector who have patients with complex wounds.

The board says her warm and approachable manner enables others to gain expertise in complex wound management and she aims to empower nurses with evidence-based literature, guidelines and processes to support best practice including ‘one-on-one’ case collaborations, face-to-face teaching sessions and electronic learning tools.

Measuring wound care outcomes has been an ongoing mantra for Natalie. To assist her and her colleagues in this she introduced to the service the New Zealand-developed 3D wound-measuring laser tool and documentation system, known as the Silhouette, to promote the routine collection of wound data during the treatment and healing process. As a result, nurses can now quantify their patients’ wound healing speeds and Natalie reports that their results compare very favourably with national and international outcomes.

Through her personal enthusiasm and collaboration she also in 2011 initiated a leg ulcer clinic in a high health need area, in partnership with a local Māori PHO. This targeted clinic continues to provide specialist wound care integrated with GPs, podiatrists, practice nurses and other health professionals. The aim of the clinic is to support the development of the primary health care team and grow the connection between specialist nursing services and general practice. Also by bringing expert care closer to a hard-to-reach population, the clinic helps avoid referrals to vascular specialists and unnecessary hospitalisations plus enabling faster healing rates of long term chronic wounds.

Natalie also works hard helping to develop local, national and international wound care practice standards and maintaining her own professional development.

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