For registered dietitians (RDs) and nutrition professionals, fall signifies the largest meeting of nutrition professionals in the world, the American Dietetic Association-hosted Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo (FNCE). You are encouraged to make plans now to attend next year’s FNCE, October 6–8, 2012, in Philadelphia. Thousands of nutrition and health professionals come together for educational sessions and networking. Hundreds of vendors display a vast array of products for the development of nutrition intervention programs as innovative and individualized as the patients they serve.

  This article discusses some products you may want to use to expand your nutrition programs for patients with diabetes who need to lose weight, patients with wounds that require extra protein, or families seeking to add some variety to their diet. All information was taken from product websites and printed literature. All medical and health claims should be evaluated by the reader.

  The Association for the Advancement of Wound Care spent the past year focusing on new strategies to meet our mission to be the leader in interdisciplinary wound healing and tissue preservation. Our 5-year plan, established for 2010–2014, strives to increase financial and human resources, assess the need for and accumulate a substantial number of new membership benefits, and retain and increase membership, just to name a few of our objectives.

  After we expanded our human resources by hiring a project manager, our patient and caregiver group flourished and was renamed Wounds in Need (WIN); plus, we decided to offer patients and their lay-caregivers free membership for life. Our state-of-the-art website www.aawconline.org, was launched and includes professional and patient caregiver sections. The website now contains many comprehensive features, including guidelines and patient education materials. Perhaps the most intriguing feature at this time is the Virtual Wound™, an interactive, evidence-based wound care education tool for healthcare providers.

Abstract

  Although difficult to quantify due to methodological variations, the worldwide burden of pressure ulcers (PUs) is substantial. Recognizing the importance of providing evidence-based care to help reduce this burden, the North American Wound Care Council societies collaborated to identify PU research and education opportunities using the PU “Guideline of Guidelines” developed and tested by Association for the Advancement of Wound Care Guideline Department (AAWC GD). Volunteer AAWC GD members compiled recommendations from PU guidelines available in 2008, searched the literature for additional research as needed, and developed evidence levels for all recommendations using an established level-of-evidence rating scheme. At the same time, AAWC members and Ostomy Wound Management readers were invited via email to participate in a content validation study of the 368 recommendations, rating items on a scale of 1 (not relevant) to 4 (very relevant and succinct). Items with a content validity index (CVI) >0.75 were considered valid. Recommendations with support from two or more randomized controlled PU trials or two or more cohort studies for diagnostic or predictive validity (A-level evidence) and a CVI >75 were grouped as ready for implementation. Recommendations with content validity but without A-level evidence were determined to be opportunities for research; recommendations that lacked content validity but that had A-level evidence were viewed as opportunities for education. Thirty-two (32) multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in the content validation study. Most (93.2%) recommendations were rated as valid. Of the 97 (26%) recommendations with A-level evidence, 90 (24.5% of total) met both strong content validity and strong evidence criteria and were rated as ready for implementation as standard of care. Most recommendations (253, 68.8%) were rated as valid but had B- or C-level evidence, representing opportunities for research. Only seven (1.9%) recommendations had a low CVI but A-level evidence, suggesting a need for education. The results show that most of the guideline recommendations are valid, that the number of PU intervention recommendations with A-level evidence is increasing, but that, in general, the need for research to replace opinion with evidence remains high across the entire spectrum of PU prevention and treatment. Understanding what is known (recommendation: ready to implement), what is not known (research needed), and what clinicians need to know (education needed) is an important step toward reducing the burden of pressure ulcers.