When treating patients with negative pressure wound therapy systems, the effective use of photographs can play an important part in providing optimum care.

“The reason photos are so integral is there are more wound patients than there are wound care clinicians,” said Beth Hawkins-Bradley, MN, RN, CWN, principal clinical educator in medical affairs at Cardinal Health in Dublin, Ohio. “For many patients, the reality is they may have a nurse assigned to manage their wound via a negative pressure wound therapy system who is not a wound care expert.”

One example of how resources can be valuable for negative pressure wound therapy system users is V.A.C. Therapy.

It’s a multi-step process that can be hard to describe in words, but is much simpler to visually demonstrate with photos, said Ron Silverman, MD, FACS, chief medical officer at KCI, an Acelity Company based in San Antonio.

These days, most people have a camera in their pocket, giving family members the ability to take their own wound photographs.

When we talk about wound photography, we usually are referring to health care professionals (HCPs) taking periodic photographs to document the healing process as part of a patient’s permanent medical record. In fact, some new cameras are made specifically for this purpose. Some of these cameras not only capture an image but also can provide wound measurements, and some even offer automated integration into the patient’s electronic health record.

Today, however, HCPs are not the only ones with cameras. Family members or visitors to a wound clinic or health care facility usually have a camera with them, and they love to use it. This has raised new questions in wound care because many of these unofficial photographs become introduced as evidence in lawsuits.

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