Dec. 5, 2025
The Health Federation of Philadelphia’s Substance Use Response Guidance and Education (SURGE) Program and the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health’s Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction (SUPHR) have partnered to launch a new, interactive wound care tool for treatment of people with substance use-associated wounds.
This resource, free to use, is available via the SURGE website.
The guide, accompanied by a series of informational videos, provides instructions and insights from wound care nurses, as well as patients who have received wound care themselves.
“Other tools exist but we were able to add information about gaining consent, making wound dressing changes more comfortable and working in the field based on the experience of people with lived experience and street medicine based wound care providers,” said Catherine Abrams. “Offering videos that feature real people discussing what it is like to give or receive wound care is destigmatizing and demonstrates how healing it is to offer ‘care’ in the true sense of the word.”
The development of this tool was prompted by members of the Wound Collaborative, which SURGE began convening in February 2023 to meet the need for communication and collaboration among wound care providers and other stakeholders who were involved in caring for wounds for people who use illegal substances. The group’s participants came from a variety of backgrounds, including expert wound care clinicians who held advanced training certifications in wound care and street outreach harm reduction workers who had no formal medical training but who encountered people with severe wounds. Connecting these groups with each other helped illustrate the questions about wound care, training and systems of care that the groups had in common.
For example, the Wound Collaborative determined that unless nurses or physician assistants or physicians received advanced training in wound care, they would not be familiar with products and wound care practices. Additionally, many groups were receiving donations of supplies that had very specific uses and did not know how to use them and a frequent topic of discussion was how to determine which supplies, and how many, should be distributed to patients for self-care. Most importantly, the group identified stigma as being a primary reason why patients avoided seeking care at hospitals despite the risk of life threatening infections.
To help address these concerns, Cate Thomson, who was a public health fellow and Rachel Neuschatz, RN, MSN, CWCN, a Harm Reduction Wound Care Nurse with SUPHR at the time, began drafting a flow chart for product selection. SURGE then formed a focus group made up of wound care nurses from Cooper University Hospital, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, the Veterans Administration, and Courage Medicine to review the flow chart, offer edits and discuss how the tool might be used for training a variety of providers in wound care and address things like stigma. It was determined that it would best be utilized as an interactive digital tool with accompanying videos.
Over the span of 6 months, SURGE worked with Rocketship Productions to transform the tool into an easy to navigate digital tool that depicts not just the mechanics of wound care but how to do it in a way that preserves the dignity and autonomy of the person receiving care. The Wound Tool offers 11 short trainer videos depicting aspects of wound care that emphasizes the human connection and art of wound care as an important complement to the mechanics of dressing changes. It does not replace the need for communication and connection, though, so the Wound Collaborative continues to meet every other month and SURGE also hosts a bimonthly Harm Reduction Wound Care Case Series led by SUPHR. You can register for these meetings at the SURGE website.
About the Health Federation of Philadelphia
The Health Federation of Philadelphia is a public health nonprofit that promotes community health by advancing access to high-quality, integrated, comprehensive health and human services.
The Health Federation of Philadelphia serves as a keystone supporting a network of Community Health Centers as well as the broader base of public and private-sector organizations that deliver healthcare, public health and human services to vulnerable populations.