Better Documentation Vital for Treating C-Section Wound Infection

Post-cesarean wounds that occur after an abdominal or cesarean delivery or simply C-section sometimes become infected due to bacterial infestation at the surgical incision site. Fever, wound insensitivity and lower abdominal pain are the common signs of infection. Such wound infections need to be treated promptly to prevent complications from the infection. They may also spread and cause problems with organs, skin, blood and local tissue. Accurate and complete documentation related to the wound is essential for effective treatment and proper wound care. Let’s take a look into this in detail.

Most of the C-section wound infections appear within the first couple of weeks post delivery. Due to this, most of such wounds are diagnosed during follow-up visits. Physicians diagnose C-section wound infections by:

  • Wound appearance
  • Healing progress
  • The presence of common infection symptoms
  • The presence of certain bacteria

A C-section wound infection is typically categorized as wound cellulitis or a wound (abdominal) abscess. The other common infections after a C-section won’t always be present in women having an incision site infection. Thrush (caused by the fungus Candida) and urinary tract or bladder infections are among them.

So, how do physicians get all the required information to determine whether the wound is infected, at what rate and what type of treatment would be appropriate? A prompt wound history provides all these details. This includes the following:

  • When the wound occurred
  • Initial size and location of the wound
  • How the wound occurred
  • What exactly happened to the wound over time
  • Approaches used to speed up wound healing
  • How well these approaches worked
  • Factors thought to delay healing
  • Any associated manifestations such as itching, and/or disruption of surrounding tissue with drainage

The other conditions that affect the healing process are also documented as a part wound history such as bacterial contamination, therapies received prior to care, allergies to drugs and so on.

Easy and quick access to wound history is therefore very important for providing appropriate treatment for C-section wound infections promptly. A general EMR may not facilitate access to the required details because there are so many templates from among which clinicians have to find wound-related templates. Sometimes, data could be entered inadvertently into the wrong fields. This will ultimately result in erroneous and redundant data. You can avoid this by opting for wound EMR. This specialty EMR has only wound-specific templates so that you can save a lot time. As there are only wound templates, inadvertent errors can be reduced significantly. If this EMR system is supported with physician and nurse interface, co-ordination among the wound care management teams can be improved further.