Page 182 - Psychology of Wounds and Wound Care in Clinical Practice ( PDFDrive )

Negative Pressure Wound Therapy 157

of the Cardiff Wound Impact Schedule (CWIS) to measure
QoL in 26 patients receiving NPWT (Mendonca et al. 2007 ).
The authors measured QoL before therapy and again 4 weeks
after treatment or at wound closure. It was reported that
there was no significant change in the QoL of patients whose
wounds healed, but that scores on the physical- functioning
domain of the CWIS decreased in ambulatory patients, and
global QoL worsened for people requiring surgical interven-
tion. The authors concluded that NPWT can cause QoL to
worsen in some cases. However, no control group was used
and NPWT did not appear to reduce QoL overall.
Other researchers have also used the CWIS to measure
QoL in patients receiving NPWT (Ousey et al. 2012 ). In this
study, the authors compared QoL scores of NPWT patients
(n = 10) with those of patients receiving traditional wound
therapies (n = 11). No significant differences were found in
QoL scores over a 12-week period, showing that QoL was nei-
ther better nor worse for NPWT patients overall. However,
a surprising finding was that patients who received NPWT
showed an improvement on the social life domain of the
CWIS in the first 2-weeks. This was not found for patients
receiving standard treatment. The authors speculated that this
improvement could possibly be due to NPWT patients devel-
oping confidence to go out and socialise, or it may have been
related to exudates management. However, the authors also
acknowledged that there were younger patients in the NPWT
group, so these patients may have been keener to socialise.
Wallin et al. ( 2011 ) evaluated outcomes of NPWT by ana-
lysing clinical data for 87 patients who received NPWT. The
authors reported that NPWT was successful in treating
wounds for 71 % of patients. However, concerns about
QoL resulted in cessation of treatment for four patients.
Additionally, equipment difficulties were noted for two
patients. This study suggests that NPWT may negatively
impact upon the QoL of some patients. However, this was
only found for a minority of the patients in the study, and the
authors relied on analysing clinical data rather than exploring
patients’ experiences.
In contrast, another study reported great improvements
in the QoL of NPWT patients (Karatepe et al. 2011 ). The