How to Treat a Wound

Featuring Dr. Tony Taylor, MD, EMBA
How to Treat a Wound
Duration: 3 minutes, 24 seconds

Wounds or cuts to the skin are very common, and some are minor and do not require any treatment.

Some can actually be life threatening if you hit a major artery. The first thing to remember is if there’s a lot of bleeding, the easiest thing to do is just put pressure on it and use whatever you have around. If it’s dirty, that’s fine. If it’s clean, that’s better. If it’s nothing and it’s just your hand, just put direct pressure on it.

And if you have concern about any of the wounds, seek the attention of your healthcare provider. If there’s a lot of bleeding, you have to be concerned about having a serious wound. So if you’re putting pressure on the wound and the bleeding is not stopping then you need to go to your nearest health facility to be assessed.

If you have any concerns about how to get there, don’t hesitate to call your first responders or your ambulance service. Once you arrive at the hospital, your physician or healthcare provider will do a thorough assessment of your wound.

What they will be looking for is how deep or complicated the wound is, whether or not there’s any foreign bodies, dirt, grime in the wound, and whether or not you have any injuries to your arteries, your nerves, your bones, or your muscles within that wound.

In some cases, you may need some additional diagnostic testing such as an x-ray to make sure that you don’t have a broken bone or that there’s not a foreign object in your wound.

Once the diagnostic testing has been completed, your health care provider or physician will then clean the wound to minimize the chances or infection. Following that, an assessment will be made of whether or not the wound needs to be stitched or closed and whether or not you need a tetanus shot.

If the wound needs to be sutured or sewn or have stitches put into it, the healthcare provider will put some freezing into the wound so the pain is less and then close the wound up with some stitches.

Once the wound is repaired it’s important to watch out for important complications related to the healing process. Any time the skin has been disrupted, the potential of having a scar is possible. By seeking early attention and proper wound closure, the scar will be minimized but not zero.

One of the more important complications to watch out for is wound infection. This will occur by you having more pain that what you would expect from the wound after it’s been repaired. You will see redness around the wound, and you may actually see some discharge coming from the wound. If any of this occurs, go back to your healthcare facility or nearest emergency department to have it assessed by a healthcare provider or physician.

Presenter: Dr. Tony Taylor, Emergency Physician, New Westminster, BC

Local Practitioners: Emergency Physician