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Test Your Wound Care Knowledge
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1. Moist wounds have a higher or lower chance of infection?
2. WIll a dry wound heal? yes/no
3. How do you know if a wound is infected?
4. Are all wounds infected? yes / no
5. Will an infected wound heal? yes / no
6. Are all wounds contaminated? yes / no
7. Will a contaminated wound heal? yes / no
8. If you have an elevated WBC is the wound infected?
9. Are swab cultures important to do on Pressure ulcers?
10. What is autolytic debridement?
11. What is exudate?
How do you think you did? Here are the answers
1. Moist wounds actually have a lower chance of infection.
2. A dry wound will not heal
3. Several ways to determine if a wound is infected, usually the peri-wound which is the skin surrounding the wound will be red, warm, painful, if you have a foul odor, yellow thick or green drainage.
4. All wounds esp. pressure ulcers are not automatically considered infected.
5. An infected wound will not heal until the infection is corrected and the debris in the wound is treated.
6. All pressure ulcers are considered to be contaminated.
7. yes a contaminated wound will heal, since all pressure ulcers are contaminated this does not stop the healing process.
8. Not necessarily. You could have an infection some where else in the body, absent any clinical signs of infection in the wound, it is probably not infected.
9. No, swab cultures are not done except rare occasions, since the wound we already know is colonized, your swab will not tell you anything you did not already know, and they are expensive to do. On an occasion that you have positive clinical signs of infection the doctor may want to r/o MRSA, if you do a swab culture, be sure you wash the wound well first and move your q-tip across back and forth through the wound.
10. Autoyltic debridement is your body doing it's job, using the juices and cells that are already in the wound, your body is already trying to clean the wound out, it is cheap and painless.
11. Exudate is the fluid you see inside your wound all those good juices and proteins working to heal the wound, as long as the exudate is not over-flowing the wound edges, exudate is a good thing.
