As the European population grows older and incidents of chronic diseases like diabetes or cerebrovascular disease increase, the care-dependency in Europe is increasing accordingly. The result is an exponential growth of health care costs.

As a consequence the management of non-healing wounds in Europe has gone through a dramatic shift in the location of service delivery from hospital towards home care settings. More wounds with complex pathological pictures due to untreated patient co-morbidities are thereby being treated at home.

There are no guidelines available covering the subject of home care wound management from a clinical perspective just as there are no recommendations of minimal requirement of providing best care and supporting the empowerment of informal carers and patients with non-healing wounds in the home-care setting.

With the Home Care Wound Care document EWMA describes recommendations and raise a debate of how to manage non-healing wounds at home. We believe that this is of crucial importance for healthcare professionals, -providers, companies and policy makers as there is a tendency in home care towards employment of non-registered nurses.