The care of complex wounds requires the maintenance of an optimum environment to eschew complications and ensure the promotion of wound healing. A new dressing distributed by Martindale Pharma is unique in its simultaneous addressing of all the factors involved.
The cost of managing complex wounds - which is projected to increase as the incidence of diseases such as diabetes become more prevalent in a growing population - is problematic for the NHS. It is also important that clinicians are able to access and use the correct dressings and therapies to manage these wounds, and facilitate the progression to healing quickly and safely.
There are a number of factors within a complex wound that can prevent it from healing and increase the risk of an infection developing. The presence of devitalised tissue on the wound surface is one such factor, and it can be identified as either black eschar or yellow slough.
Complex wounds can present with high levels of wound exudate, which can cause maceration of the skin surrounding the wound. This exudate can contain bacteria and matrix metalloproteases (MMPs) that can encourage the breakdown of healthy tissue and inhibit the action of growth factors that are essential for the wound to progress.
One of the simple strategies clinicians use to manage complex wounds is the wound bed preparation framework. This encourages a systematic approach to identify any problems that may be preventing the wound from healing.
When using this framework to select an appropriate dressing, clinicians are directed to consider whether the presence of devitalised tissue, inappropriate moisture balance, an increased bioburden or raised proteases is acting as a barrier to wound healing.
The majority of complex wounds will present with more than one of these problems, often resulting in more than one dressing product being used at the same time, potentially increasing the cost.
The most difficult aspect of wound bed preparation for general nurses is the safe and rapid removal of devitalised tissue unless they have access, skills and knowledge to use the more advanced debridement techniques. There is a substantial need for a cost-effective, advanced wound care dressing that can safely and rapidly remove devitalised tissue, and manage all the barriers that inhibit wound healing while simultaneously promoting it.
Drawtex Hydroconductive Debridement Dressing is the only dressing that is clinically proven to remove all the barriers to wound healing.
Featuring LevaFiber technology, Drawtex acts in four key areas to establish the optimal wound-healing environment:
debridement of devitalised tissue management of exudates reduction of the bacterial bioburden modulation of harmful proteases, such as MMPs.
There are dressings that claim to manage exudate, reduce bacteria and modulate harmful proteases, but only Drawtex can rapidly debride the wound simultaneously. Similarly, there are numerous options for debridement, but none of them are capable of managing exudate, reducing bioburden and modulating MMPs at the same time.
Drawtex is simply applied to the wound bed in two or three layers after cleansing, and secured with a semi-permeable film dressing or retention bandage. Early observations suggest that Drawtex has the potential to reduce the cost of wound care as well as improve patient outcomes.
One simple evaluation undertaken in an acute care setting demonstrated that, when using Drawtex on ten patients to prepare the wound bed, the cost saving on dressings alone was £264.48 per week. In this ten-patient study, Drawtex took an average of 13 days (between three and 21 days) to completely debride the wound bed.
When used on complex wounds according to the manufacturer's instructions, Drawtex can be seen to quickly improve the condition of the wound bed, thus improving the chance of healing.
