Do you remember what you were taught about wound care in nursing school? Many of you may vaguely recall a lecture about the skin as an organ system, the layers of the skin and the function in regulating temperature and protecting us from infection. As far as wound care itself, I remember learning about clean…
Wound care is one of the most rapidly changing and dynamic areas of medicine. New products and techniques are emerging all the time, and it is important for the wound care practitioner to keep up to date with advances in wound care in order to be able to continue to offer best current practice. It…
There are more than 3,000 types of wound dressings available on the market today; making it is easy to become overwhelmed by the options. The secret to understanding the various types of wound dressings is to learn the basic properties of the eight main categories of wound dressings. The dressings within each category are not identical;…
The term ‘advanced wound therapy’ is sometimes used to describe topical wound products and devices that actively promote wound healing. These wound products and devices typically cost more than other, conventional modalities.1 Examples of advanced therapies include living skin equivalents and topical growth factors, as well as devices that directly change the local wound environment,…
Phototherapy, also known as light therapy, has been used in a healing and medical context since prehistoric times. These days, the source of light energy tends to be dedicated, custom-made medical equipment rather than the sun, but the general principle remains much the same. Ultraviolet (UV) light phototherapy has also been used to treat a…
It can be argued that wound bed preparation is the one concept that has had the greatest impact on wound management practices over recent years. Wound bed preparation relies on a holistic view of a chronic wound in order to identify barriers to healing. The fundamental principles of wound bed preparation can be captured in…
Our final technique in this short series on wound debridement is biological debridement, a technique based on the use of maggots to remove necrotic tissue from a chronic wound. Biological Debridement History Historically, larvae have been used in wound management for centuries, notably in the Napoleonic Wars and then the American Civil War.1 The technique…
What is Surgical Debridement? Surgical debridement is similar to sharp debridement in that it relies on the use of forceps, scissors, or a scalpel to remove devitalized tissue, debris or other foreign materials from the wound bed.(1–3) However, unlike sharp debridement, surgical debridement is carried out in a sterile, operating-room environment in order to reduce…
Wound Debridement Techniques This week, in a continuation of our series on wound debridement techniques, we turn our attention to enzymatic debridement. Like autolytic debridement which we covered last week, enzymatic debridement relies on the use of enzymes to remove devitalized tissue.(1–3) However, in this case the enzymes are supplied externally (exogenously) rather than internally…
The introduction of antibiotics during the last century has been one of the single most important innovations in the field of wound management. Wounds that would previously have presented a life threatening risk to patients can now routinely be resolved with the use of an appropriate antibiotic preparation. Antibiotics & Resistant Bacteria However, as is…
