REBECCA WHITE, ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR HEALTH AND AGEING: The Australian government is really proud to partner with Wounds Australia to support them with a $2 million grant that’s helped them develop four modules which provide information for people who are living with a wound or caring for somebody who has a wound. We know there's so much information available for people to access online, but a lot of it is misinformation. And what we've been able to support from the strategy is developing evidence-based information people can trust, that they can use as a real source that they can either take to their treating health professional or use at home so that they can best manage the wounds - from just a small wound right through to a chronic wound.
And we know in Australia we have about 450,000 people living with a chronic wound, and this costs the Australian economy a significant amount of money. So, the more work that we can do to provide information about prevention and care early it's not only going to help that person, it's also going to take pressure off the health budget which helps free up money to do other great things.
MELISSA FREEMAN, CHAIR, CLINICAL EXPERT ADVISORY PANEL: It is such an honour to be involved in the development of the education pieces for Wound Awareness Week. The online training is available for all patients, carers, family members and clinicians of people living with chronic wounds. These education pieces will help people to know what to have in their first aid kit, how to save their skin, how to care for an acute wound so that it doesn't turn chronic. Early intervention is so important and to be able to enable and empower patients to care for their own wounds is a really great thing. And I hope that this is really well received across the country.
JOURNALIST: What is considered a chronic wound?
FREEMAN: A chronic wound is a wound that lasts anything over 30 days and can lead up to having a chronic wound for up to a year or even more.
JOURNALIST: And why is it important people are equipped with the knowledge to be able to care for themselves or care for someone else in their own home rather than you going to emergency services?
FREEMAN: Yeah. To enable a patient to be able to care for their own wounds helps a patient be involved in their own care and look after their own care trajectory. It includes empowerment for our patients - they feel included in their care, and they feel that they have a voice.
JOURNALIST: And is there specific, I guess, education regarding maybe elderly people and then also young children as well?
FREEMAN: Yes. Wounds Australia fact sheets are developed so that health literacy is available and appropriate for all patients, including over 120 different languages, for people who are living with disabilities and all types of peoples.
JOURNALIST: Anything else you wanted to add.
FREEMAN: I just hope that we all learn to look after our skin, learn to look after our patients and our family members. And by reading the fact sheets on the woundaware.org website is a great way to start.
PROFESSOR FIONA WOOD: Wounds Awareness Week is all about an SOS, sending out that SOS - save our skin. Prevention is better than cure. But in that paradigm, we need to educate. We need to take responsibility for our own education and access the information that is true and tested with solid evidence base, and woundaware.org provide that.
JOURNALIST: What is health literacy like at the moment?
WOOD: I think one of the things about wound care is that people feel that there's all sorts of things on the internet and all sorts of old wives’ tales - that can actually cause significant damage. What we'd like to do is sort of bust those myths and go to the source - the true and tried tested source is woundaware.org.
JOURNALIST: And just how important is equipping people to be able to handle their own care rather than go to the ED or go to GPs?
WOOD: With wounds and skin care, if you can look after it yourself, a small problem remains a small problem and just disappears into the background. With neglect and difficult treatment and poor treatment, then it becomes a big problem. And that's not just a big problem to that individual with pain and infection, that’s a problem to all of us because it’s a huge burden on the system.
JOURNALIST: Anything else you wanted to add?
WOOD: One of the things that's really important about the consumer and carer education systems, it tells you how to deal with the problem at the source. But also tells you how to deal with it when it gets out of control, and who to escalate to and who to ask for help. And so it works at both ends of the spectrum.
ISABELLA FITZGIBBON, PATIENT ADVOCATE: Yeah, definitely. So, my nan was diagnosed with terminal mouth cancer, and she's decided that she wanted to stay in her own home so that family and friends could visit around the clock and be by her bedside. The thing about mouth cancer is as a wound, a cancerous wound that grows externally. My nan also lived with diabetes and developed some diabetic wounds and some pressure injuries from being bed-bound from the cancer.
I became her live-in carer for eight months. I wasn't from a clinical background at all. And it felt like every week there was a new wound that developed These wounds were horrific, you know, I could get my whole hand into some of the wounds. There were cancerous wounds which brings about an intense stench, and there's oozing stuff out of it, so there's a lot of unknown with wounds. And not being a clinician, I was unsure what to do, how to help her, but I wanted to give her wishes and keep her in her home around family and friends.
JOURNALIST: And so I guess, how did you navigate those initial stages? Did you start Googling and then kind of going down a bit of a rabbit hole?
FITZGIBBON: Definitely. I used Google and I tried to find the best information, order the best dressings. I’d watch videos and upskill as much as I could. And I found that some things were great and some things were when you hit a rabbit hole on Google and it's not evidence based. But what I love about now partnering with Wounds Australia is their education is evidence-based. Their consumer training that they've just released they're short videos, so if I had that at the time I would’ve chucked one on, watched it quickly and then been able to give my nan that evidence-based care that would’ve helped her wounds.