Introduction:

Chronic wounds affect the health-related quality of life (HRQL) of people who suffer them, especially when these are difficult-to-heal injuries, which lengthen in the healing process.

Aims:

Determine the HRQL of patients with chronic wounds and analyze how the clinical evolution of the wound influences the different dimensions of HRQL, by applying the Cardiff Wound Impact Schedule (CWIS) instrument.

Methodology:

Observational repeated measures study of a cohort of patients with complicated chronic wounds (HCC). The baseline situation of HRQL was analyzed using the CWIS and the existing relationship of lesion healing measured by RESVESH 2.0 and HRQL measured by the CWIS score were searched. The study was carried out in the Complicated Wounds Unit (Primary Care of Gran Canaria and Hospital Dr Negrin). Patients with wounds of diverse etiology that met the characteristics that defined them as chronic / complex were included. Acute injuries were excluded for people who did not have the capacity to give their consent or who did not understand the Spanish language. The size has been set at 65 patients who were selected by accidental or convenience sampling from the start date of the study to complete the sample size.

Results:

At the start of the study, the quality of life measured by CWIS is below 50% of the maximum score (113 out of 245), that is, they have a low quality of life, improving significantly as the injury of the patients improves and that at the end of the study reaches 78%. The correlations between start and month and start and end were also analyzed, segmenting the sample by the different variables, sex, complete healing or non-type of injury, recurrent injury or type of coexistence, and in no case were statistically significant relationships found (p> 0.05 in all cases) and there was only a correlation between improvement of the lesion per month as measured by RESVECH and global quality of life subscale, the rest did not have statistical significance.

Conclusions:

The results showed that chronic wounds had compromised quality of life and the "well-being" domain was the most affected, especially when it was associated with clinical factors and among the clinical conditions associated with poorer quality of life, duration, wound type, depth, exudate, odor, and pain. At the start of the study, when the lesions had not received optimal treatment, it was found that the quality of life of the patients was low, improving markedly at the end of the work.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )