A Closer Look at Wound Care Services [Katie Jones]

This video provides an inside look at wound care services at Brookings Health System, explaining how the Wound Care Center treats complex and chronic wounds. It highlights the comprehensive approach, advanced treatments, and specialized team that support patients throughout their healing journey. The goal is to help patients understand when wound care services are needed and how local care can improve healing outcomes.

  • Comprehensive Wound Care: The Wound Care Center provides specialized outpatient treatment for complex and chronic wounds using a collaborative care approach.
  • Advanced Treatment Options: Services include specialized dressings, compression therapy, debridement, skin substitutes, and HBO therapy.
  • Wide Range of Conditions Treated: The team treats diabetic foot ulcers, venous and arterial wounds, pressure ulcers, surgical wounds, burns, bites, and other trauma-related wounds.
  • Certified Wound Care Team: All direct patient care staff are certified in wound care, providing expert treatment and consistent support.
  • Local Access to Specialty Care: Patients can receive advanced wound care and HBO therapy close to home, improving convenience and continuity of care.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wound care is a specialized medical service that treats complex, chronic, or slow-healing wounds using advanced therapies and a coordinated care approach. The goal is to promote healing, prevent infection, and improve patient outcomes.

A wound care center is an outpatient program staffed by highly trained professionals who treat complex wounds that may not heal with standard medical care. The team works closely with primary care providers to address all aspects of healing.

Complex wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers, pressure ulcers, non-healing surgical wounds, burns, bites, and wounds caused by arterial or venous disease often require specialized care. These wounds typically heal more slowly and need advanced treatment.

Common treatments include advanced dressings, compression therapy to reduce swelling, debridement to remove dead tissue, skin substitutes, and hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy. Treatment plans are adjusted based on how the wound changes over time.

Local wound care services allow patients to receive advanced treatment close to home while maintaining strong relationships with their care team. This improves convenience, follow-up care, and overall healing support.

Video Transcript

My name is Katie Jones. I'm a certified nurse practitioner and I work in the Wound Care Center as well as the Neighborhoods at Brookview. 

What do you enjoy most about practicing wound care?

I think what I enjoy most about practicing wound care is following along with patients along their entire course of healing. We see these patients anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months to sometimes a year or more and so we get to follow along with them along their wound-healing journey. We also get to meet their family and develop a good relationship with them as well.

What is a wound center?

A wound center is an outpatient program that consists of highly trained individuals that can treat a variety of different wounds, specifically complex wounds. We use a comprehensive and collaborative approach between our team and the patient's primary care provider to treat their wounds as well as addressing every other aspect of wound healing.

What is a complex wound?

So a complex wound would be a wound that maybe is a little bit slower to heal, one that is a little bit larger, maybe goes a little bit deeper than your standard cut, scratch and so on.

What types of wounds are treated at Brookings Health System?

We treat a variety of different wounds, but most specifically more chronic and complex wounds. So we can see anything from diabetic foot ulcers to somebody that has some arterial or venous disease caused by leg swelling. We see non-healing surgical wounds, pressure ulcers and wounds caused by trauma such as burns, bites and those types of things.

What services are offered at the Wound Care Center?

So in the Wound Care Center, we have highly trained individuals that can treat, as I mentioned before, more complex wounds. So in your doctor's office, they're typically seeing more acute wounds that the body can probably heal on its own. So they're limited in what they have available to them as far as dressings and such. So we have more dressing selections. We have wraps that we can use for compression and a variety of other things to help heal those wounds that are a little bit slower that the body is not able to do on its own.

What are common treatments used in the Wound Center?

Some of the treatments that we offer are a variety of different dressings and the way we decide what we're going to use for dressings is based on what that wound looks like as those are ever-changing. So that might change week by week. We also offer different varieties of compression as we know that swelling can delay wound healing, so we have different things to address that. We have more advanced therapies such as skin substitutes, debridement to remove dead or devitalized tissue as well as bacteria from the wound and HBO therapy.

Why would you recommend Brookings Health System for wound care?

I would recommend Brookings Health System for wound care and HBO therapy because it's really nice for people to be able to stay local and have those specialty services within our town. I'm very proud of our team. Everybody that has direct patient care is all certified in wound care, which I think is exceptional and not something that you will find in most wound centers so something that we are very proud of.

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