How can dressing changes be made less painful?

Written by WISH Clinic

Clinically reviewed by Dr. Traci A. Kimball, MD, MBA

Last medical review

Gentle steps help: loosen tape carefully, wet a dressing that sticks, pat dry rather than rub, and keep moist gauze off the skin. The bigger levers — a different dressing and pain relief around changes — belong to your wound team.

Several steps in standard dressing instructions are already about doing this gently, and they are the ones most easily rushed. For a wet-to-dry dressing: carefully remove the tape. If it is sticking to your skin, wet it with warm water to loosen it. Use a clean, soft washcloth to gently clean your wound with warm water and soap. Rinse your wound with water. Gently pat it dry with a clean towel. Do not rub it dry.

For an open surgical wound, the advice about a stuck dressing comes with an exception: if the dressing sticks to the wound, wet it and try again, unless your provider instructed you to pull it off dry. If you have not been told which applies to you, that is the first thing to settle.

What goes onto the wound matters as well. Squeeze the gauze until it is no longer dripping. Avoid putting the moist gauze onto the skin — put it only into the wound. Don’t use skin cleansers, alcohol, peroxide, iodine, or soap with antibacterial chemicals. These can damage the wound tissue and slow healing.

One instruction is conditional rather than general: in some cases, you can even rinse the wound while showering. “In some cases” matters here. It is a question for your provider about your wound, not a permission you can assume.

The larger changes are not yours to make, and that is the useful part of this answer. Dressing type is one of them — options include gels, foams, gauze and films, and your provider may use one or multiple types of dressings as your wound heals. Pain management is the other: it’s one of the kinds of help a wound care team provides, alongside wound care itself. Ask whether a different dressing would suit you, and ask about pain relief around dressing changes by name.

There’s no set rule here for when to take pain medicine before a dressing change, and no recommended product for dressing-change pain. Those are questions for whoever set your dressing plan.

What to watch for

If you have an open surgical wound, contact your provider if there is more redness, pain, swelling, or bleeding at the wound site, if the wound is larger or deeper, or it looks dried out or dark, if the drainage increases or becomes thick, tan, green, or yellow, or smells bad, or if your temperature is 100.5°F (38°C) or higher.

This is a question to take to a visit rather than solve alone. Arrive with three things: which dressing you are using, what you have already tried, and whether the pain comes at removal, at cleaning, or afterwards. Then ask the two questions that are not yours to answer — whether a different dressing type would suit you, and what can be done about pain around the changes themselves.

What we look at

  • Whether a different dressing type would reduce removal pain
  • Whether pain relief around dressing changes has been discussed and timed
  • Whether the patient is wetting a dressing meant to come off dry, or the reverse
  • Whether moist gauze is being placed onto intact skin rather than only into the wound
  • Whether dressing frequency can be reduced as the wound improves

Related questions

Sources

  1. MedlinePlus — Wet-to-dry dressing changes: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000315.htm
  2. MedlinePlus — Surgical wound care, open: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000040.htm
  3. MedlinePlus — Wound care centers: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000739.htm
Non-healing wound care at The WISH Clinic

The Wish Clinic®

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