Inside Dr. Lynn Freeman’s Wound Care Management Course
This Spring, a “Wound Care Management” class was included in the class schedule for second-year Doctor of Physical Therapy students. Our SOPT was fortunate to recruit Dr. Lynn Freeman, PT, PhD, DPT, GCS, CCRP, as primary instructor for this course.
Dr. Freeman is a specialist in geriatrics and wound management. In his wound management class, the students learned to conduct skin checks, the phases and process of wound healing, how to assess a wound, how to measure the wound and set the environment for the healing process.
For wound assessment, our DPT students learned how to determine if a wound has resulted from peripheral artery disease (PAD), venous insufficiency, from sustained pressure, a burn, injury, or infection. They also had the opportunity to use electrical stimulation as a nerve block so that wound debridement would be more comfortable for the patient.
Students were able to use diathermy, a method of providing deep heat into body tissue, and practiced pulsed lavage, a method of cleaning/irrigating a wound using water under pressure and suction to vacuum the water and debris into a filter.
The most unique thing they did was to practice debridement on a ham hock. Using food dye of various colors, the instructors created three wounds on the ham hocks, each student was to perform sharp debridement of the wounds. Happily, not one student stabbed themselves, classmate, or instructor with a scalpel.
Dr. Freeman traveled from the west side of Washington to PNWU weekly to teach this course for our students. For several reasons, including travel costs and Dr. Freeman’s schedule outside of PNWU, the class was held eight hours a day for eight weeks, on Fridays!
The first four hours of class were lectures and the last four hours were labs and applying the knowledge and skills from that day’s lecture. The consensus among the students was that it is a good thing the material was interesting and presented well, because eight hours of class strains the limits of their capacity to learn. It was worth it, given the expertise Dr. Freeman offered!
