Test – Assessment of Wound Healing Complications With a Lower Cost Outpatient Wound Management Protocol: A Pragmatic Randomized Clinical Trial in Dogs

Assessment of Wound Healing Complications With a Lower Cost Outpatient Wound Management Protocol: A Pragmatic Randomized Clinical Trial in Dogs

JVECC

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/vec.70151

This intrigued me because we were recently discussing our approaches to bite wound trauma, specifically the cases doing just fine without the extensive management that one might describe as “gold standard”. How you identify those cases is the question. I digress…

This study randomised dogs with wounds amenable to outpatient management to have two different management techniques: one with sterile gloves, no. 40 clipper blades, sterile saline, non-absorbable sutures, interrupted suture patterns and longer antimicrobial courses, or the other (low-cost) version with non-sterile gloves, no. 10 clipper blades, tap water, absorbable sutures, continuous suture patterns and shorter antimicrobial courses.

Although the infection rates (higher in the low-cost group) were the concern in this study, there were multiple ways in which the management was different between groups and I am still personally quite interested in the cases that did just fine… I’d love to read more on wound management from centres where the ‘low cost’ equivalent is simply the norm and I’m certain there is some fascinating data to be captured or highlighted.