Mark Ott, MD, a surgical oncologist and the medical director of Intermountain Medical Center, had an especially complicated patient a couple of weeks ago. “She’s a wonderful woman who had a wound that was incredibly complicated, incredibly deep, and very heavily contaminated,” he says.
Mark Ott, MD
Initially, adequately packing the wound required two large rolls of Kerlix gauze moist with cleaning solution, which had to be changed twice a day for a week in order to get the infection under control in the hospital for the next stage of wound care. “Each roll of gauze was about the size of a Nerf football — that’s how big the wound was,” he says. “Wounds don’t come much worse than this.”
Eventually Dr. Ott was able to switch the patient’s wound care to a VAC wound system, in which a foam sponge is placed in the wound and a vacuum pump is used to pull fluid out of the wound, which accelerates healing and closure. “That way the patient would heal much more rapidly and with less discomfort. It also allows her to be more mobile, and I could send her home and have Homecare nursing help manage her care at a much lower cost of care,” he says.
That’s when Jamie Romney worked some magic. When Dr. Ott saw the patient for a check-up a few weeks later, and he saw that Homecare’s Jamie Romney, RN, had done the dressing differently: She’d cut the foam into a spiral, like a cinnamon roll, and placed it in the wound bed in a circular pattern until the entire wound was covered. “I’d never seen that before,” he says. “I went, wow. The wound was healing beautifully. I mean, miraculously. It was 98 percent healed.”
Jamey Romney, RN
“Jamie taught me something very valuable. Since then I’ve used the Jamie Romney spiral foam technique and found it to be easy and more effective,” he says.
“One of the nice things about medicine is you can learn something every day,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing something; someone can help you do it better. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of VAC dressings, but Jamie opened my mind to a new way of doing them. The people around you can teach you a lot if you open your eyes and your mind.”
How did the patient benefit? “The spiral technique really accelerated healing for this patient, it led to an even better experience for her, and it saved at least an extra month of wound care,” Dr. Ott says. “The only problem I saw was that the patient said, ‘I’m going to miss my wound care visits with Jamie — we’ve become great friends. She’s wonderful and I’m sad I won’t see her anymore.’”
Dr. Ott adds, “That says a lot about what kind of nurse Jamie is. I’ve never met her in person; we’ve only interacted on the electronic medical record and in an occasional phone call. She really cares about our patients, and she’s got lots of great clinical expertise. She’ll tell you, ‘I’ve seen this and that, and you might think of doing this.’ I really appreciate that kind of teamwork and input — it makes me a better surgeon. But even more important, it leads to higher-value patient care.”
Jamie says, “Teamwork is very important to me. I have multiple nurses I rely on to ensure the care of our patients is exceptional. I learned this spiral technique on the wound vac foam from our wonderful Homecare educator, Dawn Warner, and I’ve used it ever since. I’m glad I’m able to share my knowledge with others and I’m so thrilled to see how quickly this patient healed.”
“In fact, teamwork is the key to everybody’s success in our environment,” Dr. Ott says. “When we care for patients together as part of a team, we’re always better. There are always better ways to do things. I’m happy when people do what Jamie did and let me in on the secret.”