Skin breakdown and wound development are one of the issues that are affecting the cost of health care. The hospital is not reimbursed for the treatment of hospital-acquired wounds. Hospitals are losing much money due to wounds, resources that could be used to improve care in other areas. Wounds can develop due to long hours of staying in one position, poor nutrition, and disease process, and we need to prevent them from developing. Turning patients every 2 hours and as needed can help prevent wound development. Assessing the skin daily, padding bonny prominences, and good nutrition can help prevent wounds from developing. However, when wounds develop, we need to learn how to care for them. This article has presented a fascinating way to treat and care for wounds. The author Kathleen states that assessing the patient, their medications, nutrition, hydration, psychosocial, and the environment is essential for proper wound healing. Assessing the etiology of the wound can help us develop treatment plans using various technologies to help faster-wound healing. For example, my employment organization asks us to assess all bonny prominences at admission using thermal camera technology. This thermal sensing camera technology can provide data on the status of the skin even before the wound develops by assessing and comparing the temperature of healthy skin and that of vulnerable skin. This data helps us to identify skin at risk for developing a wound 72 hours before it breaks down. We take thermal pictures of heels and sacrum at each admission and primarily use the thermal data difference to correlate with the breakdown. Using this data, my institution is unreliable in case a wound develops after admission because there was damage already to the skin even though it was not visible at the moment. Deep tissue injuries always do not show the depth of the wound until after the skin breaks. Thorough assessment and teaching nurses how to treat these wounds and assess skin is essential.

View this article published by the AANP at THIS LINK.