Olympia’s Wound Care Center is Cutting-Edge
By Amy Lyons, 3/01/2010
Hospital is the Only Facility in L.A. With Hyperbaric Chambers
Before Fred Paulos came to Olympia Medical Center, he was blind in one eye. After less than three weeks of treatment at Olympia’s center for wound management, his sight was restored.
“After about three days, I could see the walls,” Paulos said. “Now I feel great, I can read the eye chart and I just keep getting better every day.”
Paulos and his doctors attribute his healing to hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which allows patients to inhale and expose wounds to100 percent oxygen inside a pressurized chamber. The treatment is used for diabetic wounds of the lower extremities, or ulcers; compromised skin grafts; soft tissue radiation complication and other wound-related conditions.
Paulos had a central retina artery occlusion, or a stroke of the eye, a condition that required his eye to be re-oxygenated as quickly as possible.
Babak Dadvand, medical director and plastic surgeon, said the wound management center at Olympia provides patients with a full spectrum of comprehensive treatment.
“You have two components of the center – treatment and management,” Dadvand said. “A big adjunct to state-of-the-art dressings and treatment is increasing blood flow and removing debris or radicals. Most hospitals don’t have wound care centers and those that do usually don’t have hyperbaric chambers, so this is a real benefit for the hospital and its patients.”
Established in September 2008, the Center for Wound Management at Olympia Medical Center had a ribbon cutting last week in celebration of its early success. It is the only center in the Greater Los Angeles area that has hyperbaric chambers, according to Olympia officials.
“A year and a half ago we realized that in our community we have a lot of people that suffer from wounds and they don’t heal,” said Olympia Medical Center CEO, John Calderone. “There was nobody else that had a comprehensive approach to eradicate the wounds. The community needed this center, so we gutted and renovated a building to meet that need.”
