Welcome to the first issue of Wounds UK this year. We suspect your clinical areas are extremely busy at the moment and that the winter holidays are a long, forgotten memory. The media have been reporting a current lack of nurses in all clinical areas, with an increasing number of nurses leaving the profession — for the first time, we are losing more nurses than we are recruiting. Higher Education Institutions are responding by trying to recruit more student nurses, offering bespoke clinical modules and foundation degrees that are based on apprenticeship models. However, undergraduate nursing programmes take 3 years to complete and the apprenticeship form of education 2 years. So we have quite a while to wait until these newly registered healthcare staff become available for full-time clinical practice. In the meantime, we need to look after the clinical staff that are under increasing pressure and who may feel, at times, quite demoralised.