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I'm Dr. Laura Swoboda, I'm a translational scientist, a family nurse practitioner, and I'm also a skin and wound specialist in the Milwaukee area. So, one of the posters that I'm presenting this year at SAWC Fall is on wound hygiene and debridement in variable resource settings. I am really into prophylactic wound management. I like to do really thorough wound bed preparation, cleansing with non-cytotoxic cleansing agents, choosing debridement modalities, depending on the patient and the setting and the diagnosis, all of those things. A lot of times I use a number of different debridement modalities on one patient. It changes through the course of healing, or you can only do so much with a sharp debridement, that type of thing, and then following it up with usually an antimicrobial dressing or at least an advanced wound dressing to go on and treat the wound in between when I'm seeing them. 

So this poster was really on a novel debridement device. It can do wound hygiene So it's Kylon fabric, which looks like Velcro, it has hooks in it. And when you just gently scrape the wound bed, it's wound hygiene. So that's RN-level debridement, mechanical debridement. And we're removing all of the bio burden, but in a very well tolerated manner. And then when you add pressure to the device, those hooks in the fabric kind of change shape, and they become currettes. And then we can scoop out and get into our actual subcutaneous debridement, even getting into some muscle fascia when it's necrotic and a little softer. 

So, this was about using that device across all resource settings. I've had experience in, you know, American hospitals, U.S. acute care, which are so clean and lovely and you have lots of access to resources usually, and then even getting into home health, long-term care in the U.S. and abroad. So I was implementing this device in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip, where we had actually no soap, no gloves. We were really limited on wound hygiene supplies. So this was a device where with almost no training, clinicians at all levels, nurses, surgeons, everybody could you know put the product on, use it to help clean wounds and we didn't have any pain medication there unfortunately. A lot of pediatric injuries too so when you don't have pain medication and you're dealing with a kid, what can I do to help clean this wound up? You don't want it to get infected. This device was something we could use to perform that wound hygiene, do the wound bed preparation across resource settings. So it turned out to be a very high utility intervention.