How fortunate we are to have specialist teams and services that provide wound care across the UK. But, these teams and services are frequently overwhelmed. Even in pre-pandemic times, increasing referrals, rising caseloads, and the complexities of supporting people with multiple morbidities conspire to challenge service delivery (Guest et al, 2020). At the same time, an over reliance on these teams’ skills by the rest of the system gives rise to the de-skilling of some groups, while inhibiting fundamental wound care skills development in others.

When I started as the education delivery lead for the National Wound Care Strategy Programme (NWCSP), it rapidly became clear from research, conversations, and a deep dive into existing wound care education that, for those not working in a specialist wound care service, wound care was often considered the role of the nurse. And within nursing, the role of the tissue viability nurse.

Changing this mindset is not going to be easy, or fixed by any one act. A cultural shift towards lasting improvement in wound care provision requires buy-in from all professions, service providers, regulatory and professional bodies, coupled with supporting policy. And most importantly, this needs to happen collaboratively. This is exactly what we have done in developing the first multi-professional National Wound Care Core Capabilities Framework for England, published on 9 June, 2021.

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