Welcome to the Wound Witch, a project that puts a little magic into wound care in the Midwest. This magic includes education about managing wounds and a software package called AMWIS (Advanced Medical Wound Imaging System) that makes it easy to share patient records between health care providers. Also through Wound Witch all wounds will have an expert review by the esteemed Associate Professor Kerlyn Carville (Curtin University), author of Wound Care Manual(2005). 

CUCRH is trialling Wound Witch to determine

• if rural and remote primary health care providers will use the system,
• if the continuity of care is improved by sharing medical records, and
• if the quality of care improves through education, better documentation and expert review.

The project includes all complex and chronic wounds seen in the rural primary and secondary care settings. These wounds may be from any aetiology, including burns, stoma, and vascular. Diabetic limb ulcers are of particular concern in rural and remote areas because of the high rates of diabetes and vascular complications among Aboriginal people. 

The project is important because

• Managing wounds is expensive. They need frequent assessment and treatment from a health care professional.  If wounds heal faster the patient, health professional and society benefit.
• Wound care information exchange between health care providers is currently fragmented and paper based.  For example, a patient’s wound may be treated in an out-patient clinic at the hospital or by a domiciliary nurse as well as their GP but in most cases, little information regarding wound management is exchanged. 
• Managing chronic wounds is a very specialised skill and health professionals in rural areas rarely have access to experts in the field. opportunity for appropriate expert review without a means for secure clinical data exchange.

The Wound Witch will improve the quality of wound management in the Midwest, resulting in faster healing times and fewer complications.  We know this because the use AMWIS has already been proven to work in hospitals and primary care settings around Australia.   A project in the Kimberley found that compared to normal care, wounds in sites that used AMWIS and expert review healed significantly faster and patients were less likely to have amputations as a result of their wounds.

In the 12 participating Midwest sites, health professionals managing the wounds will take regular pictures of the wound, measuring progress, documenting and sharing management plans and using expert review – all done through the Wound Witch.  It will be the first trial of this type of system in Australia. 

Wound Witch is funded by the Australian Department of Health and Ageing through a Managed Health Network Seeding Grant.