Outpatient Wound Clinics During COVID-19 Maintained Quality but Served Fewer Patients.
Sang Kyu Cho, Soeren Mattke, Mary Sheridan and 1 others
PMID 34861225WHAT IT FOUND
Chronic wounds that entered outpatient clinics in early 2020 healed within 12 weeks at the same rate as in 2019 (about 50%), but new wound cases fell 19% and in-person visits fell 12%.
Key findings
01The probability of a chronic wound healing within 12 weeks did not differ between 2019 and 2020 in the multivariable model (estimated coefficient 0.002, P = 0.385).
02New chronic wound cases fell 19% between 2019 and 2020, with a nearly 40% monthly drop in April 2020 before volume returned by June.
03Clinic-level care continuity was similar: weekly visit rates 0.64 vs 0.63 (P = .08), weekly debridement rates 0.55 vs 0.56 (P = .36), and quit/transfer rates 0.09 in both years (P = .90).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used records from one national wound care network, so it may not apply to other clinics or health systems. The outcome was limited to patients who entered treatment; it cannot show what happened to patients who did not seek care. State-level healing estimates in states with very few clinics or wounds were prone to sampling bias. The analysis did not account for differences in COVID-19 incidence or how people responded to lockdown rules. Data came from routine clinical documentation, so wound size, depth, coding, and other entries may have measurement errors or variation.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that wound care was unaffected by the pandemic. The stable healing rate applies only to patients who entered treatment; new wound cases fell 19%, and April volume dropped nearly 40%. This study does not show what happened to patients who did not seek care.