14 - Speciality dressings for managing difficult-to-heal wounds

Abstract

Wound healing normally occurs in a predictable sequence, but for some wounds healing is prolonged or never achieved. The healing process is the result of a complex interaction between various cell types during wound healing, the selection of appropriate dressings and the right treatment plan, and the skills and knowledge of healthcare professionals. The challenge for healthcare professionals is to initiate effective therapeutic strategies in a timely and cost-effective way so as to reduce wound complexity, manage the patient's symptoms and expectations and, where possible, achieve healing using speciality dressings. The speciality dressings employed for the hard-to-heal wounds target wound healing with an aim to address the specific nature of the wound. However, few of these dressing materials can also be used to accelerate wound healing process in normal wounds. These dressings do this by simple physical or chemical means, controlling drug delivery, rapid control of bleeding, stimulating healing by electric current, speciality dressings for debridement, concept using tissue engineering, regenerative bandage, typically by controlling moisture levels and incorporating antimicrobial agents, such as iodine, honey or silver. The future needs to focus on raising the profile of these issues and on developing sensitive, reliable and user-friendly tools that detect and assess their impact on the patient. This will further form a strong base to perform focused research on speciality dressings with desired features for healing hard-to-heal wounds.