How To Care For Your Wounds and Minimise Your Scars After Surgery

Wonder how you should look after wounds to optimise your healing and scarring after surgery? Here are some surgeon-approved tips on how to care for your wounds and scars:

Immediately After Surgery

After surgery, the main priority is to prevent infection. Your surgeon would have covered your wounds with a dressing to seal it in a sterile field. In areas where a dressing cannot be secured, for example, hair-bearing areas like the scalp and brows, you will usually be given an antibiotic ointment to apply over the wound. Often the ointment is applied to the wound multiple times a day to keep the wound covered and moist.

If you have a dressing, ensure that it is kept dry to ensure the wound continues to be sealed. If the dressing is waterproof, it will withstand splashes of water, but not being submerged in water, so avoid activities like swimming.

Scar Prevention

After the wound has healed, the next part of the recovery process is to focus on scar prevention. The most basic scar prevention step is silicone scar gel or silicone tape application. Silicone has been clinically proven to curb the scarring process by preventing a phenomenon known as transepidermal water loss, or TEWL. Silicone tape has the added benefit to keep the scar flat, so if it possible for you to retain a tape over the scar, this would be preferred.

The key to silicone scar therapy is that the silicone gel or tape has to cover the scar at all times. So if you are applying silicone gel, this needs to be reapplied multiple times a day.

Scar Intervention

Your surgeon will be monitoring your scar. In the event that the scar acts up and becomes red or brown or hypertrophic (thickened), then it may be advisable to start treatments that will control the scar activity at this point.

Some scar intervention options include scar lasers or steroid injections. Laser treatments are proven to improve red, dark or raised scars. Often the best way to control a scar is a regular multi-pronged approach, such as a combination of treatments like lasers and injections. For difficult scars, a surgical scar revision may be the only answer to improve your scar condition.

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