July, 2006

Dear Readers,

3M Survey Provides Insight into Simplifying Wound Care Practices 3M Health Care (St. Paul, Minn) recently sponsored a survey of wound care clinicians. The survey, conducted by HMP Communications (Malvern, Pa), the publisher of ECPN, Ostomy Wound Management, and WOUNDS, showed that selecting the most cost-effective wound dressing and managing exudate are the biggest issues a clinician faces when treating a wound. The survey results offer insight into the most significant issues wound care providers face and ways to simplify the job of wound care for clinician

Trauma, caused by mechanical, surgical, biological, or chemical means, generates a wound and activates a complex cascade of closely synchronized molecular events that initiate and complete the healing process.¹ Although normal healing may slightly differ from tissue to tissue, the overall process has a similar protective role throughout the body.² The damaging effects of abnormal healing caused by reduced or excessive healing activity may either lead to healing failure; acute, chronic, or over healing; and fibroproliferative scarring.

For centuries, physicians have diagnosed skin and soft tissue infection using the classic signs and symptoms of erythema (rubor), warmth (calor), tenderness, purulent drainage, pain (dolor), and swelling (tumor). For the most part, these findings are reliable indicators of infection in the majority of acute and post-surgical wounds. However, Robson and Heggers¹ demonstrated that surgeons evaluating wounds preoperatively by visual inspection prior to flap closure were unable to reliably determine which wounds were infected.