Wound Care and Wound Clinic Operations in Ecuador

Dear Readers,

We just don’t appreciate how fortunate we are. My wife and I recently returned from Quito, Ecuador where I had been invited to give a wound care lecture at a national Ecuadorian medical education conference and to teach a wound care seminar at a hospital in Quito. We had been invited to Ecuador in June 2006 to teach wound courses in several Ecuadorian hospitals. While there, the majority of the time was spent traveling from hospital to hospital giving lectures—there was very little time to see patients or spend time 1-on-1 with people working in wound centers. For this most recent visit, I was to be at one hospital, Hospital Vozandes in Quito, and would have time to see patients in the hospital and wound center. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, has a population of over 1.5 million. The Hospital Vozandes is the only hospital in town with a 24-hour emergency room. They have modern equipment including MRI, angiography, nuclear medicine, and the premier microbiology laboratory in the country. They have the only HIV outpatient clinic in the city. I was expecting a modern, up-to-date wound center helping many patients each day. The only thing I was right about was the number of patients being treated in the wound center! The entire wound center was housed in a room about the size of a small examination room. All the bandages and supplies were in 2 small cabinets over the sink. The patients were not in short supply and were lined down the hall. I spent most of 1 day seeing outpatients and making rounds in the hospital. The only wound cleanser available was saline. The most advanced wound care dressing was DuoDerm. I truly saw every kind of wound you can imagine being treated with DuoDerm. When I talked about other wound treatment options, they were amazed.

During my lecture and seminar I stressed the need for compression dressings for patients with venous ulcer disease. The only compression dressing in the city of Quito was an Ace wrap. I was flooded with questions about current therapeutic methods we use for our patients that are totally unknown to them. Even in this “modern” hospital, wound care is still in its infancy.

My wife and I learned how we can help the people in Quito improve their care for patients with wounds and will return to do so in the future. It is without question that other countries have the same need for good, basic wound care information. The World Wound Care Alliance (WWCA) is a group formed by the Association for the Advancement of Wound Care (AAWC), under the guidance of Dr. John MacDonald, to help people in other countries obtain wound care information and training. This program will be introduced at the 2007 Symposium on Advanced Wound Care in Tampa, Fla. If you are interested in being a part of spreading wound care information to the world, please attend the meeting or contact the AAWC. In spite of problems with which we struggle in wound care, it is easy to forget how fortunate we are.

“When life’s problems seem overwhelming, look around and see what other people are coping with. You may consider yourself fortunate.” –Ann Landers



Terry Treadwell, MD, FACS