Wound bed preparation: a systematic approach to wound management

The healing process in acute wounds has been extensively studied and the knowledge derived from these studies has often been extrapolated to the care of chronic wounds, on the assumption that nonhealing chronic wounds were simply aberrations of the normal tissue repair process. However, this approach is less than satisfactory, as the chronic wound healing process differs in many important respects from that seen in acute wounds. In chronic wounds, the orderly sequence of events seen in acute wounds becomes disrupted or "stuck" at one or more of the different stages of wound healing. For the normal repair process to resume, the barrier to healing must be identified and removed through application of the correct…