EWMA Document: Home Care-Wound Care: Overview, Challenges and Perspectives

What is it about?

The Home Care–Wound Care Document looks into the wound treatment being conducted in home care settings. The document provides an overview of the main approaches to the organisation of wound care within home care settings across Europe. It also underlines the importance, scope, and level of the appropriate skills and gives recommendations for the interdisciplinary set-up necessary in order to provide safe, high-quality care for wound patients and support for their families.

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Why is it important?

As the European population grows older and incidents of chronic diseases like diabetes or cerebrovascular disease increase, the care-dependency in Europe is increasing accordingly. The result is an exponential growth of health care costs. As a consequence the management of non-healing wounds in Europe has gone through a dramatic shift in the location of service delivery from hospital towards home care settings. More wounds with complex pathological pictures due to untreated patient co-morbidities are thereby being treated at home. There are no guidelines available covering the subject of home care wound management from a clinical perspective just as there are no recommendations of minimal requirement of providing best care and supporting the empowerment of informal carers and patients with non-healing wounds in the home-care setting. With the Home Care Wound Care document EWMA describes recommendations and raise a debate of how to manage non-healing wounds at home. We believe that this is of crucial importance for healthcare professionals, -providers, companies and policy makers as there is a tendency in home care towards employment of non-registered nurses.