Is this serious competition for non-healing wounds? Geko helping to clear up painful non-healing wounds
After a pilot project launched in 2014 showed how well the geko works at improving blood flow to these wounds, the Erie St. Clair Community Care Access Centre has rolled out the program for its many patients with non-healing leg wounds.
“The geko was really helpful, because it did clear (the wound up) and it stimulated the circulation in my leg so I was able to walk better than I was walking,” said Lynn Allen, a 68-year-old Windsor woman who for four months saw no improvement in her cellulitis, a bacterial skin infection that was in Allen’s case, very far advanced around her ankle.
“It was very, very painful, I could hardly walk on it,” she said. She needed a CCAC-funded nurse to visit her home every other day for treatment and dressing changes.
“And then when I started to use the geko, that’s when (within a few weeks) it started to improve,” said Allen, who said the nursing visits were cut down to once a week as the wound healed.
The improvements have been “quite dramatic,” said Lucy Coppola, the CCAC’s director of transitional and short stay services who led the pilot project and witnessed the results.
In one case, a woman with diabetes was close to having her foot amputated until the geko was used. “It was a last-ditch effort and we managed to save that foot,” Coppola said.
What impressed her most was there was significant improvement in just the first few weeks of treatment, which is uncommon when treating these wounds with conventional methods. So far, more than 50 patients have used the geko, but it has the potential to help hundreds of local patients, said Coppola who said this area has a large number of people with these slow healing leg wounds, largely due to a high rate of diabetes, whose side-effects include diabetic ulcers.
“These folks who have leg ulcers, sometimes have been in service (receiving CCAC care) for the last three years,” she said. Typically, the wound gets a little better, then gets a little worse, and the cycle repeats. “They’re chronic wound people who we carry for many years and months and it’s an extremely painful condition to have.”
When ulcers don’t heal, it’s usually because of poor blood flow and a resulting lack of oxygenation, said Coppola. The geko supplies a small electrical impulse that stimulates blood flow, similar to the blood flow that happens when a person walks (many of these patients can’t walk much or at all). Usually, a geko attaches to each leg, the patient presses a button to increase the stimulation until there’s some muscle twitching, and the patient wears them for a couple of hours to start, increasing to six hours a day.
Coppola said it initially feels kind of strange, but you quickly get used to it.
She said she couldn’t reveal what the CCAC pays for the geko because it has a confidentiality agreement with the supplier, but she said these disposable units — they usually last for three days — aren’t overly expensive and end up saving the system when you take into account the resulting reduced home care visits and the reduced use of wound care supplies.
The pilot project was run in partnership with supplier Perfuse Medtec and the CCAC in Niagara Haldimand Brant. Coppola said other home care organizations are now beginning to use the geko, which was originally invented to prevent blood clots during long air flights.
Coppola said one major benefit she’s seen is the change in patients’ demeanour. Many of these wound patients are older people who — because of their wounds — weren’t getting out.
The geko, she said, made a big change in their lives. “Because these things are really painful and they’re embarrassing for these patients. They have these dripping, wet wounds and sometimes they smell and they’re just not nice.”
What interested her most about the geko was its potential to help people who weren’t getting better.
“It’s really nice to know we now have something to pull out of our back pocket if we’re struggling with somebody,” she said. “And we prefer, obviously, not to see more surgeries or amputations.”
Geko helping to clear up painful non-healing wounds | Windsor News - Breaking News & Latest Headlines | Windsor Star