Coulee Medical Center (CMC) is the only place between Spokane, Wenatchee and the Tri-Cities to provide full wound care services for inpatient and outpatient care.
“We’re not your average wound care center,” said Dr. Sam Hsieh, chief medical officer, in a presentation to hospital district board members last month. Dr. Hsieh’s talk addressed the state of the program and his five-year timeline to increase and improve wound care services and access.
“There is no access to appropriate wound care in this whole region,” Dr. Hsieh said, his slide showing a map of rural north central Washington. “But we have it.”
CMC offers advanced wound care technologies that a lot of hospitals don’t even have yet, Dr. Hsieh said.
Specifically, CMC can provide stem cell and an enhanced form of negative pressure therapy where a wound vac provides suction while periodically rinsing the wound. CMC can also provide surgical intervention for infected wounds, something not all centers do, he added.
Dr. Hsieh walked through a five-year plan to grow the program by offering more state-of-the-art wound treatment technologies like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, hopefully by 2027.
In hyperbaric oxygen therapy, patients breathe pure oxygen in a pressurized environment to increase the oxygen in their lungs and cells, which encourages tissue cell healing.
The center served an average of 30 patients per week in 2023 and aims to increase that to 40 by 2025.
Hsieh emphasized that CMC’s wound care services not only help wounds heal faster and prevent avoidable amputations, but also save the hospital district money. To read more, click here. (Daniel Pérez)
