Recording wound care effectiveness.

Abstract

As more and more wound treatment regimes and wound care products become available, clinicians nowadays face the difficult task of choosing the right approach for individual patients amongst an ever expanding array of options. They find increasingly that a conventional subjective description of wound status and management approach in the patient's notes can no longer answer question such as how effective a treatment regime is or what the efficacy a selected wound care product may be at a given stage of the healing process. The only way to answer these questions and, ultimately, to improve patient care is the objective recording and documentation of the status of the wound and treatment related parameters. This paper outlines progress in a variety of technologies that are now beginning to become available in clinical practice, enabling practitioners to produce immediate, objective and quantifiable portraits of the healing process.