What is ulcer debridement?

Okay, so debridement is quite simply just removal of any sort of dead tissue or debris that might be in or around a wound or an affected area. So if we think about somebody who has a lot of callus, a lot of hard skin formation, podiatrists will do routine sharp debridement with a scalpel and will remove that hard tissue, that callus, to make sure that any pressures going through the feet aren't too high to cause tissue damage or tissue injury. If we were thinking about a wound or an ulcer perhaps, we would debride any of the dead or devitalized tissue. So anything that's acting like a foreign body, we would remove that from the wound and allow the wound bed to be exposed to any treatment then that we might want to apply. So any dressings or any medicaments that might be applied to the wound would come into direct contact with the wound bed which is where most of the healing occurs. We would debride things like edges of wounds to make sure that there's no undermining where pockets of infection can become trapped and cause potential problems in the future. And we might debride foreign bodies from wounds so people who maybe have stood on pieces of glass or stood on a nail or a foreign object outside, we might debride that out of a wound or even pieces of fragments of bone, if we've had bone infection and pieces of bone have become fragmented, we might debride those out of a wound because again any of these foreign bodies will act as a focus for infection and will stop the wound from healing.