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Recently as part of a post marketing surveillance project for a specific dressing product, I had to record the dressings used on a wound over time. I’ve provided just a little example of what I found. This is just the diary of one wound, and doesn’t include all of the treatments  days for this one wound:

Dear Diary

You probably look at this and think, “That doesn’t happen in MY wound center! We don’t make club sandwich dressings and we don’t change plans every week!” But, I am pretty sure you DO, based on registry data.

For more than 10 years, we’ve had a way to select dressings more consistently and appropriately, but no one has wanted to use it.  When we started that project, we looked at the likelihood that the specific dressings chosen complied with the surgical dressing policy (e.g. putting an absorbent dressing on a wound documented as having moderate to high drainage). Care to guess what the likelihood was that a patient in a wound center was treated with a dressing appropriate to the wound characteristics documented in the chart? If you guessed that the dressing “matched” the wound characteristics about 50% of the time, you were right.

What are the implications of this?

The opinions, comments, and content expressed or implied in my statements are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the position or views of Intellicure or any of the boards on which I serve.