Treating slow-to-heal and non-healing wounds is a complex process. Patients face serious risk of infection and often suffer from multiple medical complications. Specific therapies and treatments are necessary to help these patients recover and build their strength.
The types of wounds treated at RML include:
- Slow, non-healing wounds due to diabetes, long-term steroid use, cellulitis, burns, or poor nutrition
- Slow-healing surgical wounds such as wound dehiscence
- Wounds resulting from major abdominal surgery, hip or knee replacement, or skin flaps
- Infected wounds (MRSA, VRE, or osteomyelitis)
- Wounds due to traumatic injuries
- Pressure ulcers (Stage III or IV)
- Wounds secondary to radiation therapy
- Collagen vascular wounds resulting from auto-immune disease
- Bone infections from exposure
- Enterocutaneous fistules
Our wound management program is led by three certified ostomy nurses and supported by the medical supervision of board-certified infectious disease physicians. The wound management team is rounded out by our dietitian, pharmacists, occupational and physical therapists and often a physiatrist—all critical components to the treating and healing of our wound patients.
These experts conduct thorough, independent examinations of a patient’s overall health and the extent of the wound. The team then comes together to compare findings and set a course of treatment that takes nutrition, blood protein levels, and a patient’s ability to fight infection into consideration. We chronicle progress by comparing a series of photographs and blood test results, taken each week, and monitoring the effects of diet and changes in strength and stamina. Keeping a watchful eye on the healing signs enables us to adjust treatment and therapies or implement more aggressive interventions to reach a positive outcome.
RML’s leadership in wound management was recently recognized by the National Association of Long-term Care Hospitals. Key to the award was our support surface methodology, which uses specialty beds to conform to a patient’s needs based on the location of the wound and the effects of body pressure on it.
