Knox Community Hospital has an award-winning Center for Wound Healing, and last week Clinical Program Director Vicki Kildoo spoke with the Mount Vernon News about the program’s importance and the cutting-edge science that goes along with it.
The Wound Care Center is a contracted service entity with Healogics, the country’s largest wound care company. Nationwide, nearly 7 million people are living with non-healing wounds.
“We are a comprehensive wound care company that looks at all aspects of wound care,” Kildoo said. “We follow nine essential steps of wound healing. So we look at different advanced modalities that we can use to heal wounds.”
At KCH’s Wound Care Center, nurses and other trained technicians work to limit infection or treat them with antibiotics, dressings and other methods.
The goals are to avoid infection or amputation and get the wound to heal within 12 to 14 weeks, she said.
The Center for Wound Healing treats any chronic or non-healing wounds. These can include diabetic foot ulcers, pressure ulcers among bedridden patients and other wounds caused by peripheral arterial disease where blood flow is impeded.
“What we do as technicians specialized in wound care is to determine what is preventing the wound from healing,” she said. Sometimes the answer is better control of a patient’s blood sugar levels; however, other treatments are available.
Total contact casting is ideal for diabetic foot ulcers on the bottom of the foot. Other types of wounds can be treated with hyperbaric oxygen therapy, allowing the body’s cells to heal more rapidly in a 100% oxygen-rich environment.
Additional cases may benefit from negative pressure wound therapy and even cellular-based tissue products – essentially, artificial skin.
“These skin substitutes give us the ability to place something in the wound that has all of the growth nutrients that the wound needs to heal without causing, you know, another injury to the skin,” Kildoo said.
She added that due to delayed care during the COVID-19 era, there has been about a 50% increase in amputations from pre-pandemic to now. Kildoo explained that oftentimes people will develop a wound and not even realize it.
“Evidence-based medicine shows us that weekly wound care visits significantly decrease the time to heal,” Kildoo said. “The longer a wound is open, the more risk you have for deeper infection or sepsis.”
The center has received a number of awards, most recently the Center of Distinction Award, given to centers that exceed clinical key performance indicators through the year. This encompasses healing rates and patient satisfaction.
“We have received the award for several years, with the latest in 2020,” she said. “They haven’t released one for 2021 year but based on our data we should receive one for 2021.”
If you or someone you know has an open wound, call the Center for Wound Healing at 740-393-4325 to make an appointment. No physician referral is required.
