Chronic wounds, such as pressure ulcers, vascular ulcers, and diabetic ulcers, continue to be a serious health concern in the United States. Millions of Americans are affected each year, with total cost of their care reaching billions of dollars. Once a wound heals, which may take years for some patients, the chance of recurrence is high.
Management of patients with wounds can present a considerable challenge for several reasons: (1) the lack of strong clinical evidence and research base for many aspects of wound care, (2) the proliferation of products used to treat wounds, (3) the lack of taxonomy for describing and documenting wounds, and (4) the need for more education on skin and wound care in medical and nursing schools.
It is important, therefore, for skin and wound care practitioners to be able to turn to timely, credible, and authoritative sources of information on skin and wound management. The journal of Advances in Skin & Wound Care is now entering its 28th year of successfully providing essential contemporary information and education to practitioners.
In 2015, the journal of Advances in Skin & Wound Care will continue its mission to provide peer-reviewed continuing education articles for its readers on a regular basis. Periodic journalistic research by the journal's editorial staff indicates that productive wound care practitioners highly value access to earning continuing education credits through distance learning educational models that enable them to provide better care for the patients they serve. In response, our journal will address this critical need through practical educational-based articles that are thought provoking and applicable to wound care practice.
Richard "Sal" Salcido, MD, EdD, the journal's editor-in-chief, is an acknowledged authority on wound management, as are the journal's clinical editors, Elizabeth A. Ayello, PhD, RN, ACNS-BC, ETN, CWON, MAPWCA, FAAN, and R. Gary Sibbald, BSc, MD, MEd, FRCPC(Med)(Derm), FACP, FAAD, MAPWCA, DSc(Hons). They will work with the journal's expert interprofessional Editorial Advisory Board to select papers for the journal's continuing education activities. These papers will focus on synthesizing existing research and accepted practice standards into key recommendations for day-to-day management of patients with wounds.
In addition, each year, the journal's editorial staff conducts surveys of the journal's readership to determine topics of interest for future issues. Our readers have expressed that the factors they deem critical to enhancing their wound care practice include improving quality of care, evaluating emerging products, adopting clinical practice guidelines, integrating new procedures and techniques, translating the latest research findings and innovations to practice, working on a multidisciplinary team, and reimbursement for services provided on the patients behalf.
Throughout 2014, Advances in Skin & Wound Care published articles that addressed important issues regarding pressure ulcers, such as "A Framework of Quality Improvement Interventions to Implement Evidence-Based Practices for Pressure Ulcer Prevention" and "The Pieper-Zulkowski Pressure Ulcer Knowledge Test." In addition, other articles, such as "A Hydrosurgery System (Versajet) with and without Hydrogen Peroxide Solutions for the Debridement of Subacute and Chronic Wounds: A Comparative Study with Hydrodebridement," discuss the usage of technology in wound care.
Our team of content experts, Drs Salcido, Ayello, and Sibbald, and the editorial advisory board are committed to survey the extant wound care literature on a frequent and regular basis. The product of this ongoing effort is to drive editorial content, topic selection, and to ensure that the journal is meeting the educational needs of its readership.