Key Takeaways

• Diabetic foot ulcers (rural outpatient setting): A transparent skin protectant allowed visualization of the underlying skin and provided up to 7 days of wear, supporting patients who could attend clinic only weekly or less often.
• Periwound protection: Extended wear time helped reduce maceration risk and preserve periwound skin integrity in highly exudative wounds, potentially decreasing the need for more frequent dressing changes.
• Product selection: The skin protectant adhered to wet or weepy skin, making it suitable for severely macerated periwound tissue, where some other skin protectants would not adhere.

Please note: This content is a direct transcript, capturing the authentic conversation without edits. Some language may reflect the flow of live discussion rather than polished text. 

Transcript

My name is Emily Greenstein. I'm a certified wound and ostomy nurse practitioner at Essentia Health in Fargo, North Dakota. 

Sure, so this particular product that was utilized for this poster is one that is clear, so you can see through it, so that's one advantage. Some of the products on the market are opaque, so you're not able to see through them, so you can't really do a good skin assessment. The also nice thing about this one is that it does have a wear time up to seven days, and the reason I like that for me personally is because where my practice is, it's pretty rural, so we have patients that come from two, three, four hours away so they're only able to come to appointments once a week maybe even less. So having that added benefit knowing that something is going to give them extra protection while they're not coming into a clinic and they're doing their own dressing changes is really beneficial for my types of patients that I see.

So it extended the wear times because you were able to protect that periwound skin a little bit better with the product. So we weren't worried as much about maceration versus if we didn't use a skin protectant, we might run into maceration needing to change the dressings more frequently, especially in this type of wound. So patients with diabetic foot ulcers that are more highly exudative. The problem with that is usually the exudate is very little bit higher alkalinic so it causes the skin barrier to break down a lot faster. So that's why it's really important if you have a patient that has a diabetic foot ulcer that's draining a lot that we are looking at managing that periwound skin and protecting it so that we're not losing the skin integrity we're not getting the ulcer isn't worsening over time.

So this protect this skin protectant in particular is nice because you can adhere to wet or weepy skin whereas some other products are designed for skin protection but they're not to be applied to wet or weepy skin they won't adhere. So the selection for this type of a product was because the skin was either weepy around, it was already severely macerated. So we needed something to help repair that and then protect it from getting worse so that's why we decided go ahead and use this particular product.