Joint SSI Study Wins Award

The Winners of the 2009 Roberta S. Abbruzzese Publishing award were Marissa J. Carter, PhD, Caroline E. Fife, MD, David Walker, CHT, and Brett Thompson BS for their study, published in the July 2009 issue of Advances in Skin and Wound Care entitled Estimating the applicability of wound care randomized controlled trial to general wound-care populations by estimating the percentage of individuals excluded from typical wound care populations in such trials.

Dr. Carter is President of Strategic Solutions, Inc., while Dr. Fife is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in Houston, TX, and Mr. Walker and Mr. Thompson are the Chief Executive Officer and Senior Software Engineer, respectively, at Intellicure, The Woodlands, TX.

The Award was given at the 24th Annual Clinical Symposium on Advances in Skin and Wound Care on October 23, 2009 in San Antonio, TX. The award is supported by an educational grant from Gaymar Industries, Inc., Orchard Park, New York.

"This study was a labor of love," said Dr. Carter, lead author of the study, "and took over two years to complete." Its startling results indicated that many randomized controlled trials, often considered the "gold standard" in medical treatments in evidence-based medicine, have far less applicability to patients in wound care than was formerly believed. The study found that many wound care patients with significant other existing medical conditions were often summarily excluded from clinical trials, thus limiting the applicability of the trial results to more general populations. "This should be a wake-up call in the field to do better," Dr. Carter added.

Photos courtesy of Marcia Nusgart of Nusgart Consulting, LLC.