Implications of patient shared decision-making on wound care

This article discusses the Government's drive to promote health professional and patient partnership working within healthcare, with a focus on enhancing wellbeing and how this relates to tissue viability. The literature has demonstrated how wounds impact negatively on a patient's sense of wellbeing. Assessing the impact of a wound on patient wellbeing is an essential as part of an holistic assessment process, but is even more important when the wound is chronic or recalcitrant to treatment. Scenarios are presented that illustrate how working in partnership with patients with chronic wounds can result in a therapeutic and concordant relationship when the patient's priorities of care are established, even if they differ from those of the health professionals caring for them. The article also discusses objective and subjective methods of measuring wellbeing as a means of demonstrating alternative clinical outcomes of nursing interventions within a healthcare culture where the need to meet wound healing targets still remains the norm.