Wound Hygiene FAQ: your questions answered

Wound Hygiene is a topic that comes up often in clinical conversations, and the questions are usually practical ones. This blog collects those questions in one place, for your to read at your leisure.

Why a Wound Hygiene FAQ?

If you've listened to our Wound Hygiene Bitesize podcast series, you'll have heard that global wound care is in crisis. With that in mind, we wanted to answer some frequently asked questions and how implementing Wound Hygiene could help to reduce your caseload.

Our Wound Hygiene blog also highlights the key takeaways from the series and you can hear from real clinicians who have implented Wound Hygiene into their teams and what advice they have.

If you have not heard our Wound Hygiene podcast series, you can listen on all major podcast networks. You can also watch the videos on YouTube.

What is the Wound Hygiene protocol?

Wound Hygiene¹ is an anti-biofilm protocol of care designed to give every wound the best chance to heal. It's intended to be used as a proactive strategy, applied consistently to wounds, rather than as a response once a wound has deteriorated.

The protocol comprises of four steps:

Cleanse

Removing any surface contaminants and loose debris or slough from the wound surface or surrounding skin.²⁻³

Debride

Debridement is the removal of viable and non-viable wound components, including necrotic tissue such as eschar and other foreign materials.⁴ This is particularly important for hard-to-heal wounds.

It's a major component of wound management, and it's all about preparing the wound bed for re-epithelialization towards the healing process.

Refashion

Listen to Jo Wilkins, Clinical Strategy Manager at Convatec discuss what we should be focusing on when refashioning a wound, with her cliffs and beaches analogy helping to make the importance of the wound edges much clearer!

Dress

Apply your anti-biofilm dressing and/or antimicrobial agents and reassess every two weeks and keep going while risk for infection or biofilm is still a barrier to healing.

Learn more about how our anti-biofilm dressing, Aquacel Ag+ Extra performed in an RCT.

Does the dressing choice matter at the end of the protocol?

Using a suitable anti-biofilm dressing, such as Aquacel Ag+ Extra is a proven final step to progress wound healing.²⁻³ ⁵ The two-week rule for silver dressings is a checkpoint, not a cut-off. NICE’s Late-Stage Assessment assumed up to 12 weeks of use in infected leg ulcers.⁶

In practice, "suitable" means matched to the wound, the exudate level and the patient's circumstances. Your local formulary and the product instructions for use are the right place to confirm that choice.

Can Wound Hygiene be applied consistently across a team?

Consistency is a recurring theme in community and district nursing, where care is delivered by many people across many visits. Variation in wound care is not simply a clinical issue; it has system-wide implications.⁷ Learn more about standardising your patients care.

During our Wound Hygiene Bitesize series, we caught up with a range of HCPs to get their thoughts on how they found implementing the four-step protocol.⁸

"Go for it! I cant say anything bad about it. It's showcased amazing results in Birmingham. Patients have healed after having wounds for a long time. The results speak for themselves."

Anita Charters, Tissue Viability Nurse, Birmingham

"It is standard practice now. We've embedded the pathway into our wound assessment template within the patient record and allocated a slot to cover the four steps within our mandatory training"

Jay Hughes, Tissue Viability Nurse, The Wirral

How do I get started with Wound Hygiene?

If you would like to start implementing Wound Hygiene in your everyday practice but you're unsure where to start, why not consider taking part in the Wound Hygiene Challenge?

Our dedicated team of Clinical Strategy Managers will support you and your team as you work through your own interactive checklist and help you to review and report back on successes.