Wound care can be a surprisingly emotional field. Some days it can feel like every patient visit contains challenging emotional situations that clinicians must also recover from with resilience not to carry that energy to the next visit. These stressors can be related to the patient’s medical status and critical conversations regarding their health, pain and anxiety, the death of a patient’s close family members, and even access to basic necessities like safe housing and social support. Factors other than the health care they receive are driving outcomes, consistent with what we know about social determinants of health which determine 80% of health outcomes. These life stressors and the stressors that have occurred throughout the patient’s life can contribute to physiologic changes that further delay wound healing … read more