[Clinical experiences with a new gel-like wound dressing after skin transplantation]

Free split skin grafting is now widely practised on a routine basis in accident surgery. All conventional wound dressing methods have considerable drawbacks, and this is one of the reasons why successful skin grafting is still an unsafe procedure even under the very best of conditions and quite often resembles an experiment more than a scientific procedure, with an unpredictable outcome. Today, however, we can command over a wound dressing, using the polyacrylamide agar hydrogel developed by the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology at Freiburg and which is being marketed under the trade name of Geliperm. This dressing can maintain the physiological wound environment during the first few critical days following grafting; it enables conditioning of the wound; it protects the wound against bacterial invasion and prevents drying-out of the graft and the base of the wound; and it is capable of absorbing wound secretion to a certain degree. Healing chances of the graft can be considerably improved by the use of Geliperm. Thanks to its high measure of elasticity it can adapt itself to the wound surface without sticking to it. The transparent nature of the material enables to observe and assess the healing processes at any time and to recognize possible complications during healing. Failures are almost always due to prolonged deposition of the gel plates, but this can be safely avoided by regularly changing the deposit. Deposits inadvertently left for too long, so that they have started drying at the wound surface, can be detached without any trouble and painlessly without any risk of damaging the graft.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)