Four years in waiting…..

It is now exactly one week before the opening of the 3rd Meeting of the World Union of Wound Healing Societies (WUWHS) to be held in Toronto in early June. For the pressure ulcer community there are several streams of presentations dedicated to pressure ulcers covering all aspects from epidemiology, risk assessment, prevention, aetiology and treatment among many others. Next month's pressure ulcer newsletter will include a summary of the presentations delivered during the WUWHS meeting upon pressure ulcers along with the current programme for the forthcoming EPUAP conference to be held in Bruges in early September.

Four years ago the wound healing community met in Paris at the first major scale WUWHS meeting (the first held in Australia was a relatively small conference). Many readers of this newsletter may well have attended the Paris WUWHS meeting and like me may wonder what happened to the last four years as it seems like only yesterday that the Paris meeting opened. However four years have passed and with the passage of time new pressure ulcer initiatives have developed - new NICE guidance for those of us in the UK, new European guidance on nutrition and pressure ulcers and the emerging joint EPUAP-NPUAP pressure ulcer guidelines being just three examples of activity since the Paris meeting. In research terms we have seen a large scale robust clinical trial comparing pressure-redistributing support surfaces (Nixon et al 2006) and the re-emergence of interest in pressure ulcer aetiology as witnessed by the new publications upon deep tissue injury and moisture lesions. These are all steps to be welcomed and it is to be hoped that before the 2012 WUWHS conference opens in some part of the world yet to be determined we will have seen further acceleration of interest and enthusiasm for pressure ulcer research and practice.

Michael Clark
Editor