Elephant In The Room | Wound Awareness Week 2008

Welcome to The Elephant In The Room campaign website – a portal dedicated to raising awareness of the serious problem of chronic wounds in Australia.

You can best judge the fairness and decency of a society by the way in which it treats its most elderly and vulnerable citizens. Yet in the case of wounds, horrific pressure ulcers, that debilitates and agonises its sufferers, Australia’s record is woeful.

These horrifying wounds currently affect the lives of over 270,000 older Australians yet despite its prevalence it has been virtually unacknowledged as a health problem by Government for decades. It is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about.

Most sufferers receive no public funding on Medicare or PBS for their treatment when living in the community and have to pay for bandages and dressings out of their own pocket. This may not seem such a problem were it not for the fact that even minor instances of wounds often costs over $200 a week in products alone over many months. Sadly of course wounds are most likely to occur among the frailest and poorest members of the community. What this means in practice is that wound managers and nurses have to beg for samples of products, be it in the unspeakable situation of having to reuse soiled bandages, or sufferers simply have to do without – and quietly decay and die.

In a highly developed and wealthy country such as Australia these types of horrific health complaints should not be considered by policymakers as something that is unfortunate but acceptable. That is why The Elephant InThe Room campaign is calling on Federal Government to examine this health problem and make a firm commitment to solving it.

Wounds are not something which should be considered as an inevitable symptom of growing old – quite the contrary – they are avoidable and in almost all cases treatable no matter how severe they have become. Australian sufferers deserve to live in dignity and without this ghastly menace.

If you believe that this problem is unacceptable and deserves attention from policymakers to fix it then I urge you to show your support for this campaign and sign our online petition.

Thank you.

Bryce Courtenay
March 2008