The Use of Collagen Dressings in Long-term Care: A Retrospective Case Series.

The presence of a chronic ulcer presents a challenge to clinicians in long-term care while being both a physical and psychological burden to the residents and their families. Dressings play an important adjunctive role in concert with overall efforts to manage the underlying causes of chronic, non-healing wounds. With more than 2000 dressings and a variety of treatment protocols available, chronic wound management is as much an art as it is science.

A primer on wound bed preparation.

Successful wound closure and healing are a major concern for today's clinician. Determining if the wound will progress or not relies on a comprehensive assessment, recognition of wound characteristics that will promote or impede the healing process and preparing the wound bed such that pathological features are removed allowing the healing cascade to occur. When complications are no longer a roadblock the wound will achieve a stable microenvironment and progress through the normal repairative process.