Gary Bain: Promoting patient empowerment

The whole idea in this is to actually make the clinician not just the patient advocate in terms of what you were doing to them and their wound but also empowering them so that they can make a cost argument or an economic argument not just the clinical care. So our main emphasis for today is to be able to look at saying that when you are selecting an outcome for a patient, whether that be getting a wound smaller, getting rid of slough, reducing the smell to a wound or the pain in a wound, that is your clinical outcome. But if you can measure that in some way, then what you measure is your clinical outcome, can you then put a cost with that? Because the primary outcome here is to be able to say to a patient we can get your wound better or change your wound dynamics or symptoms but at what unit cost is it to achieve that. Therefore you can explain to a patient that when you're asking them to expend funds or a manager to expend funds or a health service to expend funds you can say here is something I'm aiming to achieve in order to make this difference I will measure it and this is how much money I'm spending to get that effect.