When Jay Bell talks about taking patients for a dive, he isn’t talking about scuba diving.
The patients, or “divers,” who walk through the door of the new UF Health Wound Healing and Hyperbaric Center won’t dive into the depths of the ocean. Rather, they will walk into one of the center’s two hyperbaric chambers.
“We speak in a lot of nautical terms with this because we deal in sea level and atmospheric pressure,” said Jay Bell, program director of the center. “We say we dive a patient when we put them in here, and we call them divers.”
Patients placed into the chamber are put under the same oxygen pressure they would face below sea level.
The chamber pumps 100 percent oxygen through the patient’s blood, which stimulates the regrowth of damaged blood vessels and tissue, Bell said. The device also kills bacteria and infections in order to help chronic wounds heal faster.
The center, which opened last Monday, was brought about by the partnership between UF Health and Healogics, the largest wound-care provider in the country.
In addition to the hyperbaric chambers, the facility, located at 3951 NW 48th Terrace in Suite 211, has five exam rooms where patients can receive more traditional treatments — like artificial skin graft replacement.
The majority of patients who undergo treatment at the center are there because of wounds that have not healed within 30 days. These can stem from a wide variety of causes, including trauma accidents and conditions related to diabetes.
“We’re talking about people who have wounds that are years old,” said John Caroline, the center’s medical director, “not months or weeks.”
Wounds like these can become life-threatening because they can increase the likeliness of death in someone who has a severe medical condition such as pancreatic cancer, he said.
In addition to improving the quality of life to those afflicted with chronic wounds, Caroline said the center was established to provide outstanding outpatient care within the UF Health network.
Bell said before the center opened, UF Health sent its patients to hospitals outside of its network once they were well enough to leave the hospital.
“For continuity of care for the patient, it makes more sense to keep them in the (UF Health) network,” he said, “and fiscally, in the end, it would too.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 2/24/2014 under the headline "Health center opens with wound-healing chambers"]
