As always, this is a bumper edition of the journal with some fabulous articles that cover some of the content from Harrogate – both for those of you that are unable to attend and also for those that did attend but want more information.

It is an exceptionally busy conference this year. As well as our usual Wounds UK 3-day event, we are also running our brand new Wound Care Academy on Monday, the usual Foot in Diabetes (FDUK) event on Tuesday and another new event focused on care delivery in social care on Wednesday.

We have content from all elements of the conference throughout the journal, so if you are not able to make it this year you might want to start with the articles from Hollie Robinson and Kelly Phillips outlining how digital solutions can help you both manage your formulary and improve your product use and spend, and how this can have benefits across a whole footprint. 

There are really interesting sessions around risk assessing for safety before applying compression and also on risk of bleeding when using negative pressure wound therapy (that will be featured in the next issue).

We are also tackling some less common areas. Cosmetic tourism does not feel like the bread and butter of tissue viability, but Julie Hatch presents the case for the complexity of dealing with these patients. They are surprisingly common and can be challenging to manage for a whole variety of reasons. 

While we often have a lot of leg ulcer content, Kim Whitlock is presenting some really interesting work on use of ICD 10 data within an acute setting that she used to justify developing a leg ulcer service across their inpatient provision, highlighting the many benefits not only for the hospital but also for community care and, more importantly, the patient.

Outside of Harrogate, it seems the NHS remains under significant pressures, with many of you expressing anxiety and demoralisation as organisations creak under moratoriums on filling vacancies, constant pressures to improve patient flow, staff being stressed by the need to make hard choices about who to deliver care to and which type of care has priority – and all this before we actually hit winter. The recent publication of the Medium Term Plan (NHS England, 2025) aims to create more stability, setting out performance targets for the next 3–5 years with 15 headline measures with only one of these focusing on community health (Address long waiting times for community health services). So despite the Department of Health and Social Care (2025) rhetoric about the three ‘big shifts’, it seems that once again the focus is on acute care and maintaining flow through hospital provision. How do we leverage this to improve tissue viability provision and the profile of our patients with chronic wounds? This requires some strategic thinking and the co ordination of effort which in itself requires some data capture – so look out for some very important surveys doing the rounds soon. I really appreciate how busy everyone is and that filling in surveys may be the last thing you want to do – but data are very powerful, they help inform and prioritise the case for change. If you do see a survey (coming out via the regional tissue viability groups, the tissue viability Facebook page and advertised via social media), please take the time to complete it – it really does matter – and it is your chance to provide input into what is to come over the next few years.

Remember as a group of clinicians you hold a great deal of sway and we need to use that to deliver amazing, evidence based, positive outcome driven care for our patients – because it not only improves their lives it also improves ours.

I look forward to catching up with you whether at Harrogate or not, remember it is always better to ask for help than drown under problems.

Apologies if you won’t be at Harrogate, but to those who will be, you know how to find me, look for the fascinator. And if not – see you on the dance floor!