Comparison of traditional and modern dressings in healing surgical wounds

Abstract

Up to two centuries ago patients were lucky to survive even minor surgical interventions without contracting life-endangering infections, and having to endure extreme distress. Such advances highlighted the importance of clean dressing and sterility. Lint, gauze and cotton rapidly replaced older types of dressings. Almost a century later another major advance occurred when Winter defined the phenomenon of moist wound healing. This work led to a new generation of dressing such as films, foams, hydrogels, hydrocolloids, alginates, enzymes, low-adherent. Recently research showed that ideal dressing have characteristic that include of: Moist with exudate but not macerated, free from clinical infection and excessive slough, free from toxic chemical particles or fibres released from the dressing, an optimum temperature for healing to take place, disturbed by frequent or unnecessary derssing changes, an optimum PH value, conformability, cohesiveness, in both wet and dry situations, nonadherence, nontoxicity, absorbency, the degree to which bathing is permitted, where required, ease of use, availability in the community, demonstratable cost-effectiveness. Also recent studies indicated that modern dressing have more benifical characteristic than to traditional. Also patients whose wounds had been derssed with a modern product as opposed to a conventional gauze dressing experienced significantly less pain, and had shorter average lengths of stay in hospital. In this paper we try to compare of traditional and modern dressing.