Invisible patients, unsustainable practice: insights from 20 000 wounds to drive solutions across integrated care systems

What the paper says

Wound care represents a major and widespread contributor to the national health burden and NHS costs, yet this is rarely reflected in national priorities. Without urgent attention and improvement, wounds will continue to grow as an under-monitored and under-resourced pressure on the healthcare system. This report presents a data pool of 19472 wounds, collected from January 2017 to March 2025 from community healthcare centres – to the authors’ knowledge, this is the largest recent dataset of its kind. Key findings from the analysis showed that: A joined-up, national approach to wound care is urgently required to prevent these problems from remaining hidden in the system. There are currently no nationally mandated metrics or reporting requirements related to wound outcomes at a national level, nor is there a strategic focus on non-healing wounds – this must change. Wound care represents a major area of opportunity for preventative care, and should be seen as a crucial piece of the puzzle for implementing the 10 Year Health Plan's goals of shifting from hospital to community, and from sickness to prevention. Incremental optimisation of existing fragmented systems is insufficient. Redesigning integrated and sustainable models of care delivery that build on national priorities and bring parity with other long-term conditions is a national health imperative. The analytical, commissioning, workforce and improvement functions required to achieve this already exist within systems; they must now be coherently applied to this population of patients.