What is it about?
This is a brief summary of the 20+ years of research leading up to and including the RCT to provide an evidence base for the Available Technology Dressings (ATDs), a very specific sustainable moist dressing technique, which can be taught to patients and lay health care providers..
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Why is it important?
Incapacitating wounds are common in rural areas of tropical developing countries. In this setting, injury and bite wounds often become chronic due to poor wound management. Chronic wounds are also common among the unhoused populations of developed countries, and in rural poverty-stricken areas world-wide. In these settings, dressing changes are usually conducted by lay health care providers or the patients themselves. Advanced wound management products are unaffordable and unavailable to these patients.
Perspectives
In the RCT, ATDs outperformed wet-to-moist gauze and were only modestly inferior to the gold standard advanced dressing in this setting (polymeric membrane dressings, or PMDs) for the parameters of wound size, pain, and safety. Although PMDs relieved pain better, supported healing better, and took significant less time for dressing changes, ATDs were the least expensive, most available, most acceptable choice. Wet-to-moist gauze dressings were inferior to the other two choices in every parameter, and therefore, should not be used at all.
Dr Linda LL Benskin
Independent Nurse Researcher and Ferris Mfg. Corp.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Development of the Available Technology Dressing: An Evidence-Based, Sustainable Solution for Wound Management in Low-Resource Settings, WOUNDS A Compendium of Clinical Research and Practice, January 2024, HMP Communications, LLC,
DOI: 10.25270/wnds/23163.
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