Wound assessment: exploring competency and current practice

Management and treatment of wounds is costly to health care. As such, accurate wound assessment is an essential skill required to enhance the wound healing process. Wound assessment tools are available to assist practitioners to ensure that wounds are correctly assessed, healing is documented, and factors that could delay healing are identified and appropriately managed. In an attempt to understand current practices a survey was undertaken of delegates attending the Wound Expo 2011 wound assessment zone to provide a clearer insight into today’s practises and opinions relating to wound assessment. The results were collated and are presented in this article.