Nursing Essay: How Advances in Wound Care Impacts Chronic Patients

This essay discusses the positive impact of recent advancements in wound care on the quality of life for chronic patients. It defines wound care and emphasizes its importance in preventing contamination and converting infected wounds into clean ones. The essay highlights that chronic health conditions and wounds can impair daily life activities, but recent innovations, particularly advanced synthetic dressings like hydro cellular forms, have significantly improved patient outcomes. Research on German leg ulcer patients demonstrated the effectiveness of synthetic dressings in treating moderate to heavily exuding wounds, ultimately enhancing the quality of skin, health, and overall life for individuals with chronic conditions.

Running Head: NURSING
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Wound management
5/26/2019

NURSING
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“Recent advances in wound care positively impacts the quality of life of chronic
patients”
Wound care can be defined as the specific type of treatment mainly in context to the skin
diseases or illness such as pressure sores, ulcers, and those affecting or breaking the skin. In
addition, it has been found other types of wounds include foot ulcers, or traumatic ulcers,
which are caused due to any specific injury (Caló and Khutoryanskiy, 2015). Therefore, the
main purpose of the wound care is to prevent the contamination, and further convert the
infected wounds to clean wounds. Chronic health conditions or chronic wounds affect the
health of the patient and often leads to impairment in performing daily-life activities.
However, some of the recent advances in the wound care led to improved quality of the life
of the clients. Several studies has described the issue of impairment in the daily life activities
has been determined through the risks of chronic illness, as it impacts their physical and
mental strength, in context to wound care (Blome et al., 2014).
As it has been found that there is a high prevalence of the skin wounds, and pressure sores,
therefore it requires effective care of person. A recent advancement observed is termed as
‘Advanced dressing’, which includes the use of synthetic dressing for effective care and
recovery from the wound (VARGAS, MANCILLA and SOLIS, 2016). The advancement of
the use of ‘synthetic dressing’ led to a positive impact on the life of the clients living with
chronic health conditions such as skin burns and sores. There has been an increased demand
of the synthetic skin dressings because they are readily available at a cheap rate. In the
application of the synthetic dressings, there has been a change or advancement, i.e. Hydro
cellular form dressings are increasingly used. It has been found through the research on
wound care, that synthetic dressings were applied on 154 German leg ulcer patients, and it
resulted into effective results. They also help in treating the moderate to heavily excluding
wounds, and thus improve the quality of skin, health, and life of chronic patients
(Mukhopadhyay, Sikka and Midha, 2019).

NURSING
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References
Blome, C., Baade, K., Sebastian Debus, E., Price, P. and Augustin, M. (2014) The “Wound‐
QoL”: A short questionnaire measuring quality of life in patients with chronic wounds based
on three established disease‐specific instruments. Wound Repair and Regeneration, 22(4), pp.
504-514.
Caló, E. and Khutoryanskiy, V.V. (2015) Bio-medical applications of hydrogels: A review of
patents and commercial products. European Polymer Journal, 65, pp. 252-267.
Mukhopadhyay, A., Sikka, M.P. and Midha, V.K. (2019) Speciality dressings for managing
difficult-to-heal wounds. In Advanced Textiles for Wound Care (pp. 391-421). United Stares:
Woodhead Publishing.
VARGAS, A.G.F., MANCILLA, B.H.L. and SOLIS, H.E. (2016) Advances in the
management of skin wounds with synthetic dressings. United States: Clin Med International
Library.