Understanding biofilm: what a community nurse should know

The job of a community nurse involves effort to support wound healing. It is now well accepted in wound science that the presence of bacterial biofilm is an important risk factor for wound chronicity. Therefore, this problem is important for the community nurse to assess and address in order to avoid cost waste and to promote optimal patient quality of life. However, there exist many questions about exactly how biofilm impairs healing, how its presence can be clinically diagnosed in a wound, and how this barrier to healing can be most cost effectively treated. The goal of this article is to provide the front-line, community wound care nurse with the practical understanding needed to cost effectively address these challenges in the clinical setting.