Key Considerations in Wound Hygiene

My name is Dr. Anthony Tickner. I am the medical director of the Saint Vincent Hospital Wound Healing Center in Worcester, MA. We are west of Boston. We have a large facility. We have about 18 practitioners and nurses and residents. This is something that we do every day.

Wound hygiene is very important. Basically, if you go through the steps, you want to cleanse the wound and that can be to the provider's preference, whether it's hypochlorous acid or it's another type of cleansing agent. And then, you want to actually debride the wound. And then, once you thoroughly debride the wound, there are still some areas that need to be refashioned. You might have some necrotic tissue or some rough areas. And that is the third step of the wound hygiene protocol. And you want to refashion that wound and get it nice and pretty, so to speak. And then, you tee it up, you set it up for whatever type of product you want to put on the wound itself. Those are the steps.

We know that we often can't see biofilm, so it behooves us to really do a good job of thorough debridement and to try to clean that wound as much as possible. And like I mentioned, it's very hard to see biofilm, so you want to debride very aggressively.

There are all sorts of technologies out there. Convatec has a wonderful product there, AQUACEL Ag Advantage, which actually helps with the process. We're not only doing our due diligence in getting the wound cleaned and prepped, but we have these fabulous products like the AQUACEL Ag Advantage, which will actually help reduce that bioburden, that biofilm and it gets activated the more the wound is sick, so to speak. It has properties in it, which have helped us a lot in our clinic, and we've had great results.

I would say regardless of what type of wound you have, and even if there's a "dirty wound" or a wound that's heavily draining as opposed to a wound that looks a little more clean, I would say that a good practice would be to follow these steps no matter what type of wound you have. And then, that way you're not missing anything.