By Tiffney Oliver

Vice President, Wound Care Learning Network, HMP Education

Within the wound care community, there is a genuine and heartfelt desire to improve the quality of life for wound healing patients and their families. There is a spirit of care and support for each other, expressed through giving.

Just as our meetings have evolved to meet current challenges, so has our approach to authentically serving the global wound care community. Over the years, wound care professionals have shown compassion for the causes they are passionate about, and the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) wants to support those causes and help wound care education and patient outcomes accelerate.

That’s why we have started a unified initiative that will support the causes that are important to the wound care community. Within the past year, we have donated $20,000 to four charitable partners to help them fulfill their missions. These include:

• Wound Care Collaborative Communities (WCCC)
  SAWC Spring 2022
  The overall mission of the WCCC is to assure that patients and health care professionals have access to safe, effective, and high-quality medical devices and drugs to treat chronic wounds. The WCCC works in the pre-competitive space to identify methods, tools, approaches, and appropriate clinical evidence that will enhance understanding and improve evaluation of product safety, quality, and effectiveness. The WCCC initiatives aim to improve product safety and patient access to cutting-edge medical technology while reducing cost and time to market.
   
• Post-Acute Wound & Skin Integrity Coalition (PAWSIC)
  SAWC Spring 2022
  PAWSIC is an inter-professional team that serves post-acute care stakeholders as the source and advocate for quality wound prevention and management. PAWSIC leverages individual expertise to collectively synthesize and integrate evidence-based practices from research along with nationally recognized guidelines from collaborating organizations. It advocates for setting the highest standards of care in post-acute care for practice implementation, while acknowledging that complex regulations and reimbursement structures that may challenge the impact on the continuum of care.
   
• debra of America
  SAWC Fall 2021
  “Because the cost of doing nothing is too great,” is an axiom that defines the mission and directs all of debra of America’s actions as an organization. debra of America works to improve the quality of life of all people living with Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) in the United States. Since 1980, debra of America has remained committed to its mission to fund research toward a cure, while responding to increased need to provide direct services to patients and their families.
   
• Wound Healing Foundation (WHF)
  SAWC Fall 2021
  The WHF is improving the quality of life for wound healing patients and their families through support of awareness, research, and education. It was formed by dedicated professionals committed to wound care and to provide patients, researchers, and health professionals the resources to make significant contributions in the critical and underappreciated area of wound healing.
   

We donate a portion of every registration to our SAWC events with a goal of $10,000 given per event. Through this process, it has also been a joy to develop personal relationships with the people involved in these organizations and learn how they are working to serve underserved communities and create brighter futures for those in need.