Wound Care Initiative

We believe that every Australian with a wound should expect the same standard of care regardless of their geographic location, type of wound or health care provider.

The current health and economic burden of chronic wounds arising from diabetic complications and other comorbidities is a serious public health issue, affecting 400,000 hospital and residential-care patients and incurring $3 billion of treatment costs nationally. This health burden is likely to escalate significantly as the Australian population becomes older and with the projected increase in diabetes incidence.

It is widely acknowledged that there is an urgent need to address current wound care challenges and that better wound-management, based on evidence-based research, will improve patient outcomes and lower the health burden.

The AHRA Wound Care Initiative involved four projects:

Determine the actual (not modelled) costs of wound care based on best practice-best product.
In WA wound surveys were completed in two GP practices, three Aged Care facilities and two public hospitals. In QLD, wound surveys were completed in one public hospital and two GP practices. Using this data, as well as data collected by Silverchain Group, an independent health economist worked with the WAHTN Biostatistician Fellow to calculate the actual cost of wound care. This work has resulted in a publication in Wound Practice and Research. The project has demonstrated a cost effective and cost-saving approach to reimbursing wound care costs via the MBS or other schemes. The work was presented to staff from the Federal Department of Health and discussions regarding implementation of these findings are ongoing.

Update the 2016 National Wound Care Standards to include new guidelines.
Under this project, WAHTN led the revision of the 3rd edition of the standards to produce the Australian Standards for Wound Prevention and Management, 4th Edition, in collaboration with Wounds Australia. The updated Standards are informed by national and international guidelines developed since 2016 and include a new section – Wound Care in the Digital Age. The draft Standards were distributed to over 400 wound care related bodies and individuals Australia-wide to review the draft Standards and over 170 written reviews were received from a cross-section of wound care providers training bodies, policy makers, regulators and legislators. The new Standards are available on the Wounds Australia website and were officially launched at the Wounds Forum Breakfast in Canberra 12 September 2023 by the Minister for Health and Aged Care, the Hon Mark Butler MP, and the WAHTN A/Executive Director, Dr Debra Turner.

Develop an integrated Training and Education Framework.
The aim of this project was to provide a resource of ongoing, interactive wound-care related courses. The project was completed by Health Translation Queensland (HTQ) and Monash Partners in collaboration with Wounds Australia. The Wounds Education and Training Directory is a comprehensive source of ongoing courses in wound care and related fields. It is freely available here.

Plan for a coordinated program of research excellence.
Three areas of wound research were included in a targeted literature scoping study – chronic, acute and science – to determine the extent and nature of wound research in Australia within the global context, and a gap analysis of research needs and priorities which will inform a proposed five-year program of wound research.

The project was undertaken by HTQ and Health Translation SA in collaboration with Wounds Australia, and with representative input from across the Research Translation centres. An output of this scoping study is the development of a Wounds Research Directory, which is a database of Australian wound researchers and their work, which aims to strengthen wound research networks and promote effective sharing of evidence from research. The Wounds Research Directory is freely available here.