• Wound exudate is an important component of the wound healing process.
• Effective wound exudate control is needed to prevent exudate leakage, maceration, malodour, staining of clothes and periwound skin damage.
• Removal of excessive amount of wound exudate also supports wound healing by preventing tissue damage caused by elevated levels of components involved in tissue degradation (e.g. MMPs) found in chronic wound exudate.
• Higher levels of exudate require more frequent dressing-changes and therefore increase treatment cost.
• Superabsorbent polymer (SAP) dressings have been developed to cope with extra-fluid which cannot be handled by standard dressings (e.g. foam-dressings).
Aims
• To investigate the ability of a superabsorbent polymer dressing (Zetuvit® Plus) to manage exudate in medium-to-high exuding wounds of various aetiologies.
• To investigate potential cost-savings by switching from previous used dressings to the superabsorbent polymer dressing (Zetuvit® Plus) with higher absorption capacity.
Methods
• Open, non-comparative and multi-centre investigation including 50 patients with exuding wounds of all diagnosis.
• Each patient was assessed for at least two weeks or a minimum of four dressing changes.
• Primary endpoint was the exudate-management capabilities of the SAP-dressing and its impact on the periwound skin.
• For the cost analysis the two-week period immediately before and the two-week period during treatment with SAP-dressing was used (random subgroup of 10 patients).
