The Properties of the “ideal” Donor Site Dressing: Results of a Worldwide Online Survey

Split skin grafting (SSG) has been a widely used technique for reconstructing skin defects (e.g. in burns and chronic or traumatic wounds). The wound area created during harvest of SSG is called the donor site wound (DSW). Depending on the thickness of the SSG, the DSW should completely re-epithelialize within 7 to 21 days. Optimum local care and cover for these DSWs should promote wound healing and be cost-effective, while preventing adverse events or even complications, such as pain, discomfort, infection, and scarring. Pain and discomfort, in particular, have been reported to occur more often in DSWs than in the actual recipient site. Although a vast number of different coverage options for DSW, including dressings and topical agents, have become available in daily clinical practice, so far no optimum coverage has been found for local wound care. Consequently, large variations exist among health care professionals on which kind of wound dressing materials or topical agents to use on DSWs. The only available evidence-based reports comprise four systematic reviews (SRs), which in turn demonstrate a lack of powerful evidence for the effectiveness of any of the dressing materials used to date for DSWs. These SRs tentatively concluded that, as regards wound healing, moist dressing materials were preferable to nonmoist dressings. In the cited SRs, hydrocolloid and films were reported to perform better in comparison to other materials (e.g. alginates, paraffin gauzes, hydrofibers, and foams), as assessed by the parameters of healing and pain. Among these other materials, hydrofibers seemed to outperform tulle dressings with regard to wound healing and Annals of Burns and Fire Disasters Pending Publication