Hands-off Healing
Takes away the guesswork
Since certification, the company has received information requests from potential clients in a number of countries. In Australia, Melbourne’s Royal District Nursing Service is trialling the device. The Service employs more than 1,000 district nurses and cares for many patients who could benefit from the use of ARANZ’s invention.
In Christchurch the equivalent nursing service is the Nurse Maude Association. Nurses there are currently participating in a long-term trial of the device in their specialised wound care clinics. There are four wound care clinics that simultaneously care for approximately 100 patients per week. Generally these patients have leg ulcers related to circulatory problems, but some have other wounds that are slow to heal and require specialised care.
Patients are often referred to the clinics by doctors and district nurses working in the community.
An administrator sends the data collected by the SilhouetteMobile units to a SilhouetteCentral computer on the premises. It is retrieved later and used to update patients’ files with colour images and graphs.
Jeannie Randles, a Wound Care Resource Nurse working at the Nurse Maude Association, is very impressed by the unit she has used for about six months. “It is easy to look at a wound and say it has improved, but that is very subjective,” she says. “When you see a patient, say once a week, you can easily confuse one wound with someone else’s. We need objective measurement to really let us know if the wound is really healing or not and that is why using the SilhouetteMobile is so helpful. It takes away a lot of the guesswork.”
The device has proven its ability to aid nurses’ care for patients. For example, the device picked up the increasing extent of one patient’s wound. The deterioration was very small but it showed up dramatically when graphed by the Silhouette system. Alerted to the problem, nurses changed the patient’s treatment and were able to see rapid improvement in the wound.
Ms Randles says the device is a huge improvement over nurses’ old methods. Placing a thin plastic film over the wound and tracing over it with a pen often caused pain to patients because wound edges are frequently sensitive. The nurses then placed the drawing over square-centimetre graph paper to estimate its area. But there is a real problem with this method says Ms Randles. “Estimating how much of the square is filled in varies – some people say a square is a quarter-filled while others say it is half-filled – so the total area measured could be very different from person to person,” she says. “Nurses varied in where they drew the margins – some drew just outside and some just inside. Now with the area’s margins captured on the SilhouetteMobile image we can alter these later to get a more accurate picture.” Before using the SilhouetteMobile, nurses did not have a method for measuring wound depth at all.
Nurses previously took coloured photographs of all wounds but because the new device takes accurate images, they now only do this for large wounds that do not fit within the device’s field of view. “You can take several images with the SilhouetteMobile and join them together, but we have not done this yet,” says Ms Randles.
“The best thing about using the device is that we don’t need to touch the patient’s wound in order to measure it. It is very easy to use and we love it.”
