October the 12th of this year marked the 20th World Arthritis Day. Currently, around one in seven people in the UK currently live with arthritis and this figure is expected to rise to one in four in the next 15 years.

This article by Dr Wendy Holden, outines how the charity Arthritis Action helps those with the condition and how you can help your patients who have arthritis.

Exudate management is one of the most challenging aspects of wound care. In this article, Sylvie Hampton outlines why managing exudate is important and how dressings contribute to effective healing.

For most of us, discussing anything to do with our bowels will only happen when hell freezes over. But the state of our stools should be talked about in order to prevent constipation and/or its associated complications.

In this article, Frank Booth outlines prevention and management strategies.

For many patients, particularly the elderly, multiple comorbidity management requires many different drugs. In this article, Dr Aisling Koning outlines the issues of polypharmacy.

This article was first published on the Health-Care Arena website and has been produced by kind permission of Pentland Medical.

This case study, adapted from Rosemary Rose's Molnlycke Wound Academy Scholarship and Awards winning entry, suggests that negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) and allogeneic keratinocytes can be used successfully as an alternative to a skin graft to heal full thickness skin loss head wounds.