Carroll Hospital is hosting its second annual Wound Care Education Day on Friday, June 8, a free event for those who either have, or are at risk for, developing hard to heal wounds and their caretakers or family members.
“It’s really to educate the community about how they can screen for things that contribute to wounds, such as peripheral arterial disease,” said Denise Sirenne, a nurse practitioner in the Carroll Hospital Center for Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine.
The free event will be held 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Shauck Auditorium in the hospital’s East Pavilion, 291 Stoner Ave., Westminster, and no registration is needed.
In addition to information on chronic wounds and risk factors, there will be vendors providing various screenings for those attending as well as raffles, games and light refreshments, according to Sirenne.
“The vendors we are going to have there are actually all of different specialties — including vascular, diabetes — that will actually be able to screen the patients in various methods,” she said, “whether it’s just an oral screening about risk factors or a hands-on screening looking at their feet.”
In the center for wound care, Sirenne and her colleagues deal with patients who need support in healing from acute wounds, such as those from a surgery, and from chronic wounds, wounds where the normal healing process is somehow disrupted and which sometimes need oxygen under pressure — in a hyperbaric chamber — to get back on track.
Of those with chronic wounds, Sirenne said, many people’s troubles begin with diabetes and the nerve damage, or neuropathy, it can cause in the extremities. The neuropathy can dull the sensation of pain in the feet, so that people may injure themselves and not realize it, she said, while also shifting the musculature and bony structure of the foot as well, such that people develop pressure points and calluses.
“It’s kind of like walking on a rock each time you step,” Sirenne said. “They don’t know that, though, because they don’t feel it, so there is no evidence of anything going wrong with their feet until they see a trail of blood. They literally could have a nail through their foot and not even know it because they don’t have that pain sensation.”
And once that injury has occurred, diabetes makes the site of the wound more prone to infection, according to Sirenne: “It makes it more challenging to heal the wounds, so it’s kind of like a revolving door.”
Sirenne said she hopes the event will draw out not only those who have had chronic wounds, but those with diabetes who haven’t had such an injury, and even those who are merely at risk for diabetes.
“There are a tremendous number of patients who are diabetic, and some who are and don’t even know it,” she said. “Anyone who knows someone with wounds that have been chronic and very challenging to heal, those are the people we really want to educate.”
Some of the tips?
“We educate people to make sure they are checking their feet every day and that they are wearing footwear that’s appropriate for them,” Sirenne said.
Summertime may incline some people to walk in sandals or go barefoot, but Sirenne cautioned that those people who are already experiencing neuropathy in their feet may not be able to tell that sunbaked asphalt or sand is too hot for their skin.
“We have had many patients that have been in here for that reason: They scalded their skin and burned the skin on the bottoms of their feet because of walking across a really hot, sandy beach, thinking that because they couldn’t feel it didn’t matter,” she said. “It’s just very common sense things that we really want to instill.”
