Wounds: here today and gone tomorrow! The use of temporary skin tattoos in teaching wound care to associate degree nursing students

As a nursing instructor in an associate degree nursing program, imaginative and creative teaching methods have been sought for a variety of nursing concepts or skills. Ideas have been gleaned from peer journals, online resources, workshops, and conferences and through discussions with veteran nursing instructors. However, this teaching idea did not come through academia. This novel idea came from the neighborhood discount store: Wal-Mart. This instructor came across several packages of different styles of temporary skin tattoos while shopping at the neighborhood Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart marketed the temporary skin tattoos for the Halloween season, which depicted exaggerated wounds with several of the tattoos having sutures or "surgical" clips. The tattoos provided the nursing students with fairly realistic wounds to perform sterile wound care with. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]