Wound healing as a speciality is in its orphan stages, and it remains important that all clinical information is recorded and evaluated, including ‘real‐life’ experience. While clinical studies remain important, with the randomised controlled trial being the gold standard, ‘real‐life’ experience is often more useful and practical for clinicians on the front line.
The creation of a registry will allow the capture and more importantly the use of this data as validation of a clinical approach. To aid the development of wound care as a clinical specialty we believe the registry approach will become accepted as an additional model for collecting data for new treatments for patients with wounds.
When collected and stored in a registry the data can be examined for a variety of parameters, including usage statistics, adverse event reporting and successful outcome data. This robust economic and epidemiological data on wounds and wound prevention and treatment, both nationally and internationally, is essential for effective evidence‐based decision making leading to the adoption of cost‐effective wound prevention and treatment solutions and planning for service delivery in the future, in particular for cost‐strained healthcare systems.
The provision and uptake of best prevention and treatment for acute and chronic wounds are hampered by the fragmentation of health funding and health service provision globally. Treatments that may reduce cost to the health system as a whole are not embraced as the increased cost to those delivering the treatment is not directly compensated. The savings are therefore not realised. A more global view of the benefits of improved healing needs to be embraced and for this to happen, policy and decision makers need robust data and evidence. This requires the demonstration that health interventions are effective at reducing the problem, and critically, that these are cost‐effective. Until this information is obtained, allocation of resources to wound prevention and treatment at an appropriate level, and with appropriate treatments and interventions, will not occur.
National and International Wound Registries will allow the combined epidemiology and economics of wound prevention and treatment across the global diverse healthcare landscapes for the first time. This activity will highlight the gaps in knowledge and inform future clinical trials to be managed within the healthcare environments.
Such registries exist in many other clinical areas and geographies. Now it is time for this to become a reality in wound care. The input of data however has to be cognisant of the environment in which wound carers work. It has to be both practical and sensible. The creation of such a registry and input process should be user defined and driven, opposed to technologically driven.
For clinicians involved in this subject as you see the emergence of this type of activity it is in your best interest to become involved and participate. If we are going to emerge from the orphan subject we are today we need data – hard and fast!
Keith Harding, Editor‐in‐Chief Douglas Queen, Editor