If there is an injury or a wound affecting the skin and disfiguring it and the body cannot heal it naturally, and then skin is taken from another part of the patient’s body and grafted so that the wound can heal. If the patient’s donor skin is not enough or not suitable, then an external donor can be contacted for skin grafting. There are different kinds of skin grafts. A full-thickness skin graft is ideal for the visible areas of the face. They retain the characteristics of the normal skin like color, texture, thickness and other parameters as compared to the split-thickness skin grafts. Full-thickness grafts do not undergo contractions while healing and this is very important when the face or the hands are involved in the grafting. Also such grafts are likely to grow with the patient hence if this treatment is done on children, the graft will automatically grow with them and pose less problems.
However, full thickness skin grafts can be used only for small wounds, uncontaminated, well vascularized wounds and do not have a wide range of applications like the split-thickness skin grafts. In full-thickness skin grafts the choice of the donor site is very important, as the wound will retain the characteristics of the donor skin. The thickness, color, texture and other such things have to be matched with the wound site and the donor site.
Full-thickness grafts can be harvested from the upper eyelid, nasolabial fold, and preauriclar or post auricular regions as they are used generally to cover the defect on the face or neck. When harvesting, one has to consider the symmetry of the donor site as well. Harvesting is necessarily done under total anesthesia, as it can be quite a painful procedure. A scalpel may be used for harvesting skin in the full thickness skin graft. One has to remember that there will be scars on the donor area as well as the recipient area.
Once the skin is harvested, it is placed on the wound site and kept in place by sutures. Proper medicines and dressing is used. The patient has to rest for a couple of days at least. The skin begins healing within twenty-four hours but there should not be any trauma to the graft for the donor area. The doctor or the nurse gives adequate instructions for the recovery, as each graft will have different features and cannot be generalized |
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