Too much choice can be a good thing

After the recent EWMA conference in Brussels, Jason Beckford-Ball shares some of his highlights of one of the big events in the wound care calendar

Being somebody who has difficulty even choosing what they might have for dinner each night (I’m currently weighing the benefits of spaghetti bolognese and chilli con carne), I’m very glad that I’m not the person who has to work out where to hold international wound care conferences. For example, do you pick somewhere that has fantastic modern conference facilities and hotels, like Dubai? Do you prioritise the availability of good restaurants and nightlife offered by a bustling capital city like Paris? Or is it more important to choose a venue where people are going to want to travel to anyway, such as Cairo (the pyramids), Las Vegas (the gambling), or Geneva (the cleanliness). Just thinking about it makes me feel a little travel sick.

By holding its annual conference in Brussels, the European Wound Management Association (EWMA) seems to have got it right this year. Not only is Belgium’s capital the home of chocolate, strong beer and chips with mayonnaise, it is also handily placed on mainland Europe and full to bursting with historical buildings and famous landmarks.

Image:Brussels – Mannekin Pis. Credit: zcamerino on Flickr.

Dressings
If only choosing where to hold a conference was all the wound care community had to worry about. Before the EWMA conference itself kicked off I attended a pre-event consensus meeting of wound care clinicians, which demonstrated that choice is also crucial when it comes to the viability of dressings.

The meeting was addressed by two design consultants who had been tasked with investigating how patients, rather than manufacturers or clinicians, regard wound dressings. Their research threw up some rather interesting results.

For example, despite some manufacturers and clinicians focusing on the long wear time of dressings, this was often negated by the fact that patients (especially those who were living at home or self caring), regard the feeling of being ‘clean’ as of primary importance and would change a dressing after two or three days, or when there was strikethrough, regardless of whether this was clinically effective. To the patient, the fact that they felt clean was more important than any clinical consideration.

This kind of information has massive implications for both dressing designers and clinicians, after all, there is little point in designing state of the art long-lasting dressings that patients are simply going to remove after a couple of days.

Diagnostics
Diagnosis is also predicated on choice and EWMA saw the release of a document that examines at the role of proteases in wound diagnostics. The panel of eminent wound care clinicians who compiled the document explain how elevated protease levels within a wound can present an unseen impediment to wound healing, rendering many clinicians at a loss at how to treat wounds.

In the future, the experts agreed that a diagnostic tool that identifies the presence of elevated protease levels would help clinicians to identify those wounds at risk of becoming hard to heal, as well as guiding clinicians as to the right type of dressings. The document can be viewed by clicking here.

Conference highlights
The Wounds International team had a stand at the conference and enjoyed meeting many of the delegates (hello if you were one of the people that popped by). We were delighted that many of you registered for the first Wounds International webcast on hard to heal wounds, which will focus on the problem of wounds where healing is prolonged or never achieved. The reasons why many wounds do not close are multiple and effective management lies in recognising the complexity of these factors. The challenge is to identify as early as possible when a wound is hard to heal.  You can register for the Webcast at by clicking here, and be part of this innovative new phase in wound care education.

Finally, it was great to see so many clinicians from all over the world enjoying a dedicated wound care conference, with presentations that varied from ‘gene polymorphism predisposing to non-union of long bone fractures’ to ‘speed dating with the wound care industry: a novel approach to providing tissue viability education’.

With that level of choice, what wound care clinician could fail to learn something from their trip to Brussels…..

Jason Beckford-Ball from the WI Headquarters, London.