Drywounds matter: the use of occlusive sterile sanitary napkin dressing in hip and knee replacement wounds.

The worst fear of a joint replacement surgeon is infection. Many factors are known to contribute to the development of infection in a surgical set-up. Post-operative wound soakage is one of them. Wet wounds lead to repeated dressing, exposing the wound for contamination, risk of infection and increased length of hospital stay (1). Therefore any attempt to avoid this scenario is desirable. We report the use of occlusive, sterile sanitary napkins for dressings in total hip and knee replacement wounds. Commercially available sanitary pads are sterilised individually (Figure 1) using ethylene trioxide (ETO) for 24 hours. These pads are directly applied to the surgical wound (Figure 2) and affixed to the skin using large Tegaderm transparent dressings (3M, St Paul, MN) Occasionally, two napkins are used depending on the length of the incision. All dressings are changed in the ward usually by 48 hours post-operatively and again, if there is any soakage (Figure 3) of the dressing. We compared this form of dressing with standard ward gauze dressings. Demography of the data is presented in Table 1. Our results show that the use of napkin for dressings has reduced the number of dressings, significantly, before staples removal.