By the time you read this month's pressure ulcer newsletter the long-awaited international pressure ulcer prevention and treatment guidelines will have been presented in full to the US NPUAP conference delegates. Since 2005 the NPUAP and the EPUAP have been working towards the first US-European joint guidance upon both prevention and treatment. This has been a major undertaking involving over 70 academics and clinicians from the US and all parts of Europe. Over 100 organisations worldwide signed up to provide comment on the draft texts as they were released at www.pressureulcerguidelines.org. With the sheer scale of the project it is perhaps a testament to the guideline development process that the NPUAP and EPUAP have emerged as strong partners having achieved agreement in such contentious issues as pressure ulcer classification! Now that the work has been completed the next stage lies in getting the material to those who might want to compare their practice against the guideline's evidence based recommendations. It is pleasing to see that the EPUAP and the NPUAP have agreed to launch the guidelines in Europe at the Tissue Viability Society conference in April this year (April 27 and 28th). This reflects well upon the strength of the wound healing community in the UK and its ability to act as host for such a major initiative. It is becoming clearer that all delegates to the TVS conference will receive a copy of the full guideline which runs at present to over 200 pages! This will be a start towards the wide dissemination of the guideline material. The challenges for the EPUAP and the NPUAP are clear and perhaps reflect that the creation of the guideline documents is only the start of the process - essentially there are three main hurdles to overcome - how are the guideline recommendations to be disseminated? How are issues of implementation of the new guideline to be addressed? And finally who takes responsibility for updating this major achievement from the EPUAP and the NPUAP.

Michael Clark
Editor