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Buckley et al. (2005) attribute increased costs in wound care to variability in wound assessment and inconsistency in documentation, demonstrating a need for accurate identification and documentation of wound assessment findings to determine wound progression or deterioration. The BWAT© tool contains thirteen items to assess the wound: size, depth, edges, undermining, necrotic tissue type, amount of necrotic, granulation and epithelialization tissue, exudate type and amount, surrounding skin colour, edema and induration. Each item has five categories, one of which the nurse must choose as the most appropriate response. In order to use the tool, nurses must have a working knowledge of a wound vocabulary and wound assessment skills.
Many nurses are visual learners which is the predominant learning style for adults. These learners like visual aids and coloured handouts that are visually stimulating (Avillion 2005). This also applies to novice nurses and nursing students, with as many as 78% being visual learners (Borucki and Krouse 2005). A group of three Enterostomal Nurses, and a Nursing Researcher, in partnership with the original author of the BWAT, undertook this project to collect wound photographs that depicted each characteristic of the BWAT, and then to validate the photographs. Ethical approval and informed consent to use the photographs for educational purposes was obtained. Enterostomal Therapy Nurses and one wound care specialty nurse participated in two validation exercises to finalize the photographic content to augment wound assessment and documentation using the BWAT tool. This presentation will review the methodology and results of the validation project. Further plans for the Pictorial BWAT are to publish it in a journal that will allow free-online access of the guide for all health care providers, and to test teaching interventions to examine whether the new format helps to implement use of the paper BWAT tool.