Student name: Jacky Ching
Introduction
Nowadays, negative pressure wound therapy or NPWT is one of the most increasingly used therapies for the intervention of acute and chronic wound management (Sandoz 2014). It is a non-invasive therapy that assisted in the promotion of fast healing of acute or chronic wounds. For the reason that NPWT is relatively new area to be evaluated in many surgical wards in its efficiency and within this practice the research into NPWT is still more contemporary. It is too early provide a statement whether NPWT will have an advantageous or disadvantageous influence in wound management. While the literature tackles a variety of such theories, this literature review will direct on five main themes, which will be compared
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Search terms/ Number of articles found The terms that were used: negative pressure wound therapy, ulcers, wound, lower extremities and healing, and using the Boolean operators ‘AND’ and ‘OR’. There were more than 13,214 articles found using different databases, which were mostly a duplicate of an article from other databases that were either related or unrelated from the period of 2010 to the present day.
Refined search terms/Number of articles found The databases were searched using the refined terms: NPWT, VAC, negative pressure dressing, pressure ulcers, legs, acute or chronic wound and the Boolean operators ‘AND’ and ‘OR’. There were more than 6883 articles published from the period of 2010 to 2015 in PubMed database only. Nevertheless, some of the articles were either relevant or irrelevant.
Data bases used A systematic search was performed using the World Journal of Orthopedic, National Centre for Biotechnology Information, PubMed, Annals, Research gate, and International wound journal
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In clinical settings, application of NPWT varies from the thickness of the wound and the type of NPWT materials. It is important to ensure that the NPWT is working properly to allow the wound to heal. ‘The method of application entailed placing a sterile, polyurethane foam dressing, into the wound defect after it had been trimmed to shape. Adhesive drape was used to cover the foam and an additional 3 to 5 cm of surrounding intact skin’ (Nather et al. 2010, p. 354). However, Ashby et al. (2012, p. 2) only provided a short overview guide in the application of NPWT, where ‘it involves the application of a suction force (negative pressure) across wound surface via a dressing’. Meanwhile, studies on NPWT conducted by Yao et al. (2012), Nain et al. (2012) and Suissa, Danino and Nikolis (2011) did not provide methods of application when in view of the efficiency of NPWT. The method of application should be included when taking into account the efficiency of