Managing wound exudate with the superabsorbent dressing C-Sorb

Of the £8.3 billion the NHS spent on 3.8 million patients with a wound in 2020, £5.6 billion was spent on the 30% of wounds that can be classed as hard-to-heal (Guest et al, 2020), referring to those that have not closed in the expected timeframe (Atkin et al, 2019). With demographic forecasts predicting people to live longer (Office for National Statistics, 2022), the incidence of hard-to-heal wounds is likely to increase, and those patients will have increasingly complex needs. Dealing with this increasing burden of hard-to-heal wounds requires a growing understanding of how to manage the factors impacting on a wound's ability to heal.

One of the main symptoms associated with hard-to-heal wounds is the production of excess exudate (Atkin et al, 2019). Exudate, often referred to as ‘wound fluid’ or ‘wound drainage’, can be defined as ‘material composed of serum, fibrin, and white blood cells that escapes into a superficial lesion or area of inflammation’ (World Union of Wound Healing Societies, 2019). This increase in exudate production may be due to a prolonged chronic inflammatory response stimulated by a physiological cause, such as in malignant fungating wounds and inflammatory ulcers e.g., rheumatoid ulcers and pyoderma gangrenosum (Bernardes et al, 2021). Excess fluid of any composition on the skin for any prolonged period, which can be as little as a few minutes, will impair the protective nature of the stratum corneum, the outer layer of the skin, increasing the risk of skin injury and infection, whatever the cause of the fluid accumulation (Collier et al, 2014).