Carolyne Fife demonstrates in her columns “the horror of providing wound care”. In two blogs (below) she describes the impact the apparent low stature of wound healing has. Basically; the lack of underpinning of interventions leads to a dramatic reduction of funding. As it should. However, in the case of wound care the lack of underpinning is not a result of lack of efficacy but a lack of research outcomes. So here the reduction of funding is a result of the dysfunction of research. The cause is very simple; having a wound is generally regarded a complication and therefore not interesting. Sadly society and (have to say) most doctors are not interested, lack knowledge, do no research and are astoundingly unaware of the numbers. As a result, the science of wound healing is under-represented and under-developed in the medical profession. (Why don’t we have regeneration specialists? ) Therefore, even if Caroline would have generated data and healed patients (which should not be the same) we still lack a proper framework to translate findings in a wider context. This would be no problem if having a wound was a rare phenomenon. But it is not, wounds lead to massive human suffering and consume a relatively big part of health care spending. But the latter is a financial issue. Luckily the financial guru’s know that if you cut the budget the cost will go down, as simple as that. Doctors agree and push the patients out of their budget (back to home care) asap. The fact that budget cuts cause massive suffering (but numbers do not cry or die) and that the costs resurface somewhere else in the system in a 10-fold time or so is not interesting because that is NIMB-cost. (Not In My Budget) And since 2008 we all know who pays for the final NIMB budget.
The second blog mentioned is below. Is this what you get when one applies regulations instead of knowledge: if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail? Is this the future of EU healthcare funding?