The Management of Wound Healing

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The management of wound healing in various health care settings can vary according to what treatment is performed, in our scenario a patient has come to us in regards to a complication that has occurred after a resurfacing procedure. This essay will discuss the procedure that has occurred and the issues and implications surrounding the procedure in terms of infection control. How the wound was created and what should have occurred during the repair process and what isn’t expected to occur. Possible causes of delayed wound healing will also be looked at and how we expect to manage in this situation, we will also discuss how we could prevent this from reoccurring.

A resurfacing procedure is considered to be any treatment that removes a layer of skin or layers of skin. Resurfacing treatments can include and are not limited to micro-dermabrasion or the more intense dermabrasion, laser resurfacing with different types of laser or intense pulsed lights and chemical peels ranging in different depths (Philips & Hughes, 1998). After any type or resurfacing procedure, whether it would be a chemical peel or micro-dermabrasion, collagen formation is activated in the papillary dermis and elastin is produced in the papillary dermis (Phillips & Hughes, 1998). Some infections that can occur through having treatments such as micro-dermabrasion or chemical peels are bacterial infections. Bacterial infections can occur due to the fact that the barrier is impaired and the types of infections that can occur are herpes simplex, staphylococcus, streptococcus and pseudomonas (Khunger, 2007). Laser resurfacing has its own list of complications that can occur. In terms of removal of skin laser resurfacing can remove an approximate amount of 1.0cm of skin...

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...).it is also very important that when treating all patients that we use a new set of gloves for each patient and the use of sterile gloves for wound dressings, open wounds and surgical procedures. If we were to apply a dressing for our client we need to use sterile gloves as the wound is open and we would want to prevent bacteria from entering (Flores, 2008). It is also important that we use as much disposable equipment as possible with our client and that all equipment is properly disinfected for each patient (Capriotti, 2003). We would also need to educate our client on the same principles, the client has to be very diligent as well in terms of their hand hygiene and to avoid touching the treated area as much as possible and if the wound is open to apply some sort of dressing to avoid it from becoming contaminated (Collawn, 2001 & Martin-Madrazo et al., 2009).

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