Dear Colleagues,

The mission of the WOCNCB(R) is to promote the highest standard of consumer care and safety by providing credentialing in wound, ostomy and continence and foot care nursing. One component of achieving our goal is to constantly keep our attention focused on current best practices as evidenced in the current literature.

Safety and quality care are dependent on making available to bedside decision makers the best possible research.1 With that in mind, the WOCNCB(R) makes our commitment to safety and quality care visible by sponsoring the annual literature review you are holding in your hands: Review of the 2011 Evidence for WOC and Foot Care Nursing Practice.

David Sackett, a Canadian physician who was part of a group that coined the term Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), defined EBM as "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical experience with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research."2

The information explosion on the World Wide Web has created a growing challenge to sort out critical information in a usable form to aid decision making at the bedside. By producing this Review of the Evidence, we fulfill our mission to promote patient safety and high-quality care and contribute to EBM practice by disseminating critical clinical evidence in a format that can be used every day to positively impact patient care.

The WOCNCB(R) published its first Review of the Evidence for WOC Nursing Practice in 2009. We are now publishing our fourth Review of the Evidence. This document is the result of the hard work of dedicated WOC nurses who understand that high-quality and safe WOC and foot care nursing starts with an informed clinician. We hope that this Review of the Evidence will be a valuable resource for answering those difficult clinical questions. With gratitude, we thank those dedicated volunteers who searched, appraised, and summarized the current evidence so that all of us can provide safe and quality care to our patients.

Sincerely,

Donna L. Thompson, MSN, CRNP, FNP-BC, CCCN

President, WOCNCB(R)

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