If you're interested in abscesses, there are some community health docs (I think family practice and IM docs, probably? Josh Bamberger, below, is a family practice/public health doc) who work with injection drug users, who are putting special focus on working out systems of care to treat abscesses before they get so bad that they become surgery dept. patients. There was actually an abscess task force in San Francisco, which there may still be, which was designed to set up a care system to catch the wounds when they were still easily treatable. Admissions for abscesses were becoming a major cost for SF's public health system. I left town about a year ago so I'm not sure what the status of their work is right now.
Using the SF example, I think there are some people in other cities who are trying to work on similar models, e.g., doing wound care at needle exchange sites, etc.
http://www.health.org/govpubs/mmwr/vol50/19a3.htm
The authors of the above MMWR article would be good to talk to/correspond with if this is the kind of wound care you're interested in, especially Dan Ciccarone and Josh Bamberger. I don't have contact info handy but I'm sure calling their respective institutions should get them.
--joe
