[The wound care center in surgery: an interdisciplinary concept for diagnostic and treatment of chronic wounds].

In Germany there is no standardized wound care for patients with chronic wounds in specialized centers. We have established a wound care unit for the past 6 years. The principal concept of therapy was characterized by standardized local surgery, moist wound dressings and concomitant treatment of the underlying disease. We performed local therapy, coordinated the interdisciplinary treatment and developed a new wound documentation system for quality control. We established a close network, integrating general practitioners and home care organizations to realize a mainly outpatient treatment supported by short hospital therapy. Exclusive outpatient treatment was performed in 42% of all patients. According to our prospective data, we achieved an improvement in wound care: 69% of the wounds resistant to therapy for a mean of 30 months healed within 12 months after therapy according to our protocol. Our data strongly supported the importance of local surgery: neither wound depth nor wound infection had any influence on the healing rate, presumably due to radical excisional debridement of necrotic tissue. The presented data justify on medical and economic grounds the establishment of such wound care centers in Germany.