The demand for wound care products is growing rapidly (Roberts, 1998). At the same time there has been an exponential rise in demand for evidence to support clinical nursing practices (Bradley et al, 1999). Evidence-based medicine has been proposed as a means of closing the gap between research and everyday practice (Medicines Resource Centre, 1995). It is defined as the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients (Sackett et al., 1996).

One of the major difficulties in striving to practice evidence-based medicine is how to determine the “best-evidence” for a given situation. Randomized controlled trials (RCT's) are considered ‘gold standard' in terms of clinical evidence (Britton et al., 1998) but they have limitations with respect to wound care, so other types of evidence must also be considered.

Case studies can provide evidence on poorly researched areas and rare complications (Nelson, 2000). They can help to generate hypothesis, direct future research (Collier, 1998), to share a wound management problem and to share clinical experience (Nelson, 2000).

The poster presentation will describe how the use of case studies can be taken one step further in the hierarchy of clinical evidence. By setting up an outcomes tracking evaluation of a large number of patients with wounds, using selected dressings from a range of hydrocellular polyurethane foam* dressings, the authors have pooled the outcomes to form a summary of evidence or a mini case-study series. The full details of the number of patients and wound types that have been collected will be summarized in the full poster presentation.

A new approach of combing ‘real-time' data from a number of case studies may be a useful form of clinical evidence in the medical devices arena (Towler J, 2001).