Human wound assessment: status report and implications for clinicians.

Wound care has long been carried out by professional nurses. Yet, as a result of their increasing qualifications and changes in health care practices, the nurse's role in and responsibility for wound care has expanded. Despite this, there is a paucity of valid and reliable methods by which nurses and physicians alike can evaluate healing status. This chapter provides an overview of the instruments designed to evaluate healing in humans, focusing particular attention on those intended to measure healing noninvasively. Implications for clinical practice and suggestions for research also are offered. Additionally, this article is written to raise clinicians' awareness to the need for concentrated efforts in devising clinically usable, valid, and reliable instruments to evaluate human tissue repair.