How often will I need to visit a wound clinic?

You will receive treatment at the wound center weekly or more often, depending on your treatment plan. Non-healing wounds may take months to heal.

You will receive treatment at the wound center weekly or more often, depending on your treatment plan.

Weekly is the floor rather than the expectation. More often is allowed for, and what decides it is the plan written for your wound.

How long that continues is a separate question, and the answer is less comfortable. Non-healing wounds may take months to heal. Surgery may be performed to speed up healing, and some wounds never heal completely. A course of wound care is often measured in months, not weeks.

Between appointments the work does not stop, and that’s by design. Your providers will give you instructions on caring for your wound at home in between visits. Nurses clean and dress your wound and teach you how to care for it at home, and your wound care team may also include physical therapists.

A wound center may also arrange other kinds of help alongside the dressing changes: healthy eating, diabetes care, smoking cessation, pain management and physical therapy. Those appointments are part of the same treatment, because the reasons a wound is not healing are often not in the wound.

If getting to weekly appointments is difficult, say so at the clinic rather than solving it privately by missing them. Transportation, work, and who changes the dressing at home are part of what a treatment plan has to fit around.

What to watch for

A wound is considered non-healing if it has not started to heal in 2 weeks or has not completely healed in 6 weeks.

Between visits, contact your provider if you notice signs of infection: redness, swelling, pus or bleeding from the wound, pain that gets worse, fever, or chills. Those are reasons to be seen sooner rather than at the next scheduled appointment.

Missing appointments is worth raising rather than absorbing. The clinic cannot adjust a plan around a difficulty it has not been told about.

Wound Wizard is general education and cannot assess your wound or your situation. Your own clinician is the right person to ask about your schedule.

What we look at

  • Reviewing how the wound has changed since the last visit
  • Adjusting the treatment plan and the visit interval
  • Teaching or reviewing wound care done at home
  • Arranging other support the plan needs

Sources

  1. Wound care centers — MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine https://medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000739.htm