“Fun with Fruit" A Portable Cognitive Training Model for Teaching Surgical Wound Debridement

Wound care practice is similar to surgical practice in that there are certain basic motor skills that need to be learned and mastered to be an effective practitioner. Currently practitioners come to wound care from various disciplines; Primary Care, Family Practice, Internal Medicine, Dermatology, Emergency Medicine, Surgery, Advanced Nurse Practitioners, Podiatry, and Physicians Assistants to name a few. With varied exposure in their training and practice prior to coming to wound care, motor skills to perform basic debridement may be limited or is not within the scope practice of their specialty. Basic Debridement skills should be a part of any education and training program for them to perform complete wound care services in an outpatient clinic. A wound debridement model that is reproducible and consistent, simple to repeat, readily available, of low cost, provide immediate tactile, visual and auditory feedback, have a direct and obvious purpose would work well to provide cognitive feedback for learning motor skills. If the model would solve or avoid ethical issues regarding lab use of animals would be desirable. While biological models are necessary to study disease process or the impact of the procedure on a biological system, wound debridement is a manual dexterity task that does not require evaluation of impact on the system. In fact, the simpler and more apparent the purpose or goal, the better the model for learning the skill. Debridement in the clinic setting can be taught and mastered with simple task oriented stations. This presentation outlines those tasks.