The Clinicians Speak, page-148

The EFORT Congress 2022 is being held in Portugal next month. It’s described as the largest platform for European Orthopaedics to exchange knowledge and experience within Europe and with colleagues from other parts of the world.

One of the abstracts being presented is Use Of Biodegradable Temporizing Matrix Grafts In Complex Wounds In Orthopaedics and it comes from South Africa.

The abstract author, Dr. Craig Brown, is a Scottish-born orthopaedic surgeon who worked in Melbourne and Hobart for almost a decade before moving to South Africa in 2017. Dr. Brown now works in a hospital in Khayelitsha, a township of Cape Town with a population of 500,000. The hospital has only two consultants, of which he is one, and a maximum team of six with no Registrar. In South Africa the ratio of surgeons is 1.63 per 100,000 compared with a ratio of roughly 5 per 100,000 in Australia. The Khayelitsha hospital has over 7,000 outpatients.

Khayelitsha Hospital faces multiple challenges, besides being chronically under-resourced -  violence (with shootings and stabbings commonplace), trauma and injury, poor maternal health, high rates of communicable diseases like TB and HIV and diseases such as hypertension and diabetes and high incidence of substance abuse and mental health problems.

Dr. Brown reports a retrospective case series of 6 patients with complex upper and lower limb wounds in whom BTM grafts were used.

He concludes:

Biodegradable Temporizing Matrix grafts are efficacious, safe and cost-effective in the management of complex wounds. Negative pressure therapy dressings / machines / aftercare and hospital stay with multiple theatre visits are offset by the cost of this graft. Furthermore, there is no patient donor site morbidity and permanent skin scarring at the split skin graft harvest site. BTM grafts should be a modality to consider in complex wounds in selected patients.

It’s been over 5 years now since Novosorb BTM entered the South African market and we’ve heard almost nothing since, other than that the South African distributor, Ascendis Medical, is achieving some sales through the public hospital system. So it’s pleasing to hear news of BTM being put to good use in Khayelitsha.

https://scientific.efort.org/site/speakers/?trackid=0&a=efort2022#!

http://www.sunorthopaedics.com/khayelitsha.html

https://www.spotlightnsp.co.za/2022...esses-and-challenges-at-khayelitsha-hospital/