Chronic wounds-including pressure ulcers, venous ulcers, and diabetic ulcers-are a serious health concern. Millions of Americans are affected each year, with total costs of their care reaching the billions of dollars. Once a wound heals, which may take years for some patients, the chances of recurrence are high. Venous ulcers, for example, have recurrence rates approaching 70%.
Management of patients with wounds can present a considerable challenge for several reasons: (1) the lack of an evidencebased model of care; (2) the explosion of products used to treat wounds; (3) the lack of a common language for describing and documenting wounds; and (4) the superficial nature of 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 credible, authoritative sources of information on skin and wound management. Advances in Skin & Wound Care is now entering its 14th year of successfully providing this essential information to practitioners.
Currently, no journal dedicated to skin and wound care provides continuing-education articles for its readers on a regular basis. Yet research done by the editorial staff of Advances in Skin & Wound Care indicates that practitioners are very interested in earning continuing-education credit this way. Starting in 2001, Advances in Skin & Wound Care will offer a continuing-education article in each issue to provide practitioners with a distance learning opportunity-an optimal educational model for busy practitioners-that will assist them in understanding the core of wound management.
Richard "Sal" Salcido, MD, the journal's Editor-in-Chief, is an acknowledged authority on wound management, as is the journal's Clinical Consultant, Cathy Thomas Hess, BSN, RN, CWOCN. They will work with the journal's expert Editorial Advisory Board to select papers for the continuing-education activity. 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, the editorial staff of the journal will conduct several surveys of the journal's readership and of conference attendees each year to determine topics of interest for future issues. Searches of the current literature will also be done periodically. The results of the surveys and the literature searches will be shared with Dr Salcido, Ms Hess, and the board to assist them in topic selection and to ensure that the journal is meeting the informational needs of its readership.
FIGURE
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