Your wound care nurse will:
- Examine and measure your wound
- Check the blood flow in the area around the wound
- Determine why it’s not healing
- Create a treatment plan
What are the Treatment Goals:
- Healing the wound
- Preventing the wound from getting worse or becoming infected
- Preventing limb loss
- Preventing new wounds from occurring or old wounds from coming back
- Helping you stay mobile
What will the nurse do in order to treat your wound? They will clean out the wound and apply a dressing. This will include debridement: a process of removing dead skin and tissue to help your wound heal. General anesthesia (asleep and pain-free) may be used for debridement of a large wound.
Surgical debridement uses a scalpel, scissors, or other sharp tools and includes
- Cleaning the skin around the wound
- Probing how deep the wound is
- Cut away dead tissue
- Cleaning the wound
Other ways to remove dead or infected tissue are to:
- Sit or place your limb in a whirlpool bath.
- Use a syringe to wash away dead tissue.
- Apply wet-to-dry dressings to the area. A wet dressing is applied to the wound and allowed to dry. As it dries, it absorbs some of the dead tissue. The dressing may be wet again and then gently pulled off along with dead tissue.
- Put special chemicals, known as enzymes, on your wound to dissolve dead tissue from the wound.
After the wound is clean, a dress will be applied to keep the wound moist, and to promote healing and prevent infection. Some helpful dressings that can be used alone or in combination include
- Gels
- Foams
- Gauze
- Films