About WoundsAfrica
There are enormous contrasts concerning the quality of wound care in Africa. There are specialized clinics in Egypt or South Africa where all sorts of modern dressings and advanced treatments like negative pressure treatment or hyperbaric oxygen chambers are available. On the other side of the scale, many people living in rural areas have minimal access to proper wound care and may be lucky to have some sort of improvised dressing at all.
It has been very challenging for us to adapt the content of this website to address the needs of most caregivers in Africa as there are such huge differences in knowledge and resources from region to region. Therefore, we have included a section in most chapters that advises healthcare workers treating wounds in off-the-grid clinics with minimal resources. We hope you will find something of practical value for your daily work on our website, regardless of what resources you have. WoundsAfrica is unique - we have not seen any other website with a similar approach to ours. We believe that the knowledge we share here is also relevant to many other world regions.
Wounds Africa is an educational website about wound care on the African continent for nurses, medical assistants, podiatrists, doctors, and companies producing/distributing relevant products. We aim to make the content easy to understand and practically orientated. The content should be used as a reference guide and a manual on diagnosing wounds and performing practical procedures. The main focus is on challenging chronic wounds. We try to keep the language as simple as possible but do not want the text to be oversimplified. For some purposes, more academic-style texts may be more relevant to our readers, and some excellent websites are serving a more scientific approach to the topic ( see also the section " Links" in the main menu).
The majority of procedures in wound care are not evidence-based. It is challenging to perform solid scientific studies in wound care because the patient groups are often not very homogenous. In other words- there are a lot of different factors that influence wound healing other than our interventions, and the numbers needed to treat to see scientifically valid results can be impracticably huge. Therefore much advice about wound care is still depending on expert advice. A considerable amount of advice on our website relies on personal experience and is often not backed by scientific evidence. We expect some of our readers to disagree with some of our advice. We are always happy to receive constructive criticism to improve this educational site's contents continuously.
Wound care is a vast specialty, and it is impossible to stay up-to-date on all fronts. Again, we are very grateful when readers contact us to point out out-of-date areas or statements which are even plainly wrong. Remember, this website has been developed to serve you. The more input we receive from you, the better the site will become. We therefore also want to encourage our readers to contribute with patient cases or anything else that has to do with wound care in Africa. Are you, for example, planning a workshop on wound care- let us know, and we will use the WoundAfrica network to spread the word - maybe others will be encouraged by your efforts to do something similar.
We have chosen Facebook and Instagram as our social media channels. In the future, we may also include WhatsApp in the portfolio. We ask our readers to keep comments/discussions on a professional level without discrimination. Remember also that it is forbidden to post pictures of patients on social media without their prior consent.
WoundsAfrica is a demanding project, and we have a team of wound care experts contributing to the project. WoundsAfrica is a non-profit organization, but we rely on sponsors and financing through advertising to make the website available to you free of charge and to keep it up-to-date.
WoundsAfrica collaborates with partners throughout the African continent - from healthcare workers in specialized clinics to medical assistants at remote rural clinics. We are continuously looking for more healthcare workers dealing with wound care who can contribute to this educational site. If you are interested in this type of work, please contact us. ( image credit: Christina Morillo)
Senior editors:
Isabella Stokka Landmark
is a certified nurse practitioner in a surgical department at a public hospital and a tissue viability nurse. She has been involved in several research projects and holds lectures/workshops about woundcare. She also holds a position for quality control and patient safety.
Anne Catherine Skaar
is a senior consultant anesthesiologist with long experience with anesthesia of patients undergoing surgery for chronic and acute tissue damage. She also has experience from the burn department at Haukeland University Hospital. In addition, she holds a teaching position at the Western University of Norway.
Bodo Günther
is a senior consultant in orthopaedics and has worked with advanced wound care for over 20 years. He is involved in several research projects and is a regular lecturer at congresses and workshops internationally. He has a position as assistant professor at the Western University of Norway. He is also a member of the board of Norway's woundcare association (NIFS)
Disclaimer
Teaching materials like PowerPoint files may be downloaded if the copyright is clearly marked as WoundsAfrica.
If you would like to use sections of text or images, please contact us beforehand and tell us where this material is intended to be used. Note: many images on the website have copyrights from other sources. These are marked with the original source and must not be copied without consent from that source. We will not be responsible for juridical claims arising from such copyright breaches.
Many of our recommendations are expert opinions or based on personal experiences without any solid scientific backing. Some of the products mentioned may not be approved for such use - some of our recommendations imply off-label use of these products. In such cases, we always state this clearly in the text, and it is up to the discerning reader if they will want to use the product in the way we have discussed. WoundsAfrica will not take responsibility for any adverse events arising from using products off-label. For example, many caregivers apply a numbing cream called Emla into wounds so that a debridement procedure is less painful. Emla cream is, however, not yet approved for application in open wounds, yet very many caregivers use this for lack of other alternatives. It is believed to be a safe practice, but little documentation exists for this. When we write about Emla cream and even state that we have good experiences with this product in open wounds, this should not necessarily translate into that we advise you to the same thing. We want to share information that will help caregivers provide the best possible treatment under given circumstances but cannot take responsibility for adverse events that can arise because of these treatments. When you use a product off-label, you do this on your own responsibility.
