Medical Thermography – Transform reactive care into proactive care with a revolutionary approach to reducing Pressure Injuries, DFUs, and Pain. 

Diabetes UK⁽¹⁾ reports that every 25 minutes, one person in residential care is admitted to hospital as a result of their diabetes. This leads one to look at some of the statistics of people living in residential care: –

• 80% have dementia or significant memory problems⁽²⁾
• 27% have diabetes⁽³⁾
• 60% of those with diabetes also have peripheral arterial disease (PAD)⁽⁴⁾
• 11.6% prevalence of Pressure Injuries (PIs) in care homes⁽⁵⁾

The combination of Diabetes and PAD automatically puts residents into the high-risk category for Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFUs), while dementia adds a greater burden on caregivers for early prevention of DFUs and PIs

Meantime, the NAPCHD⁽⁶⁾ recommends daily foot screening for high-risk diabetics, while the IWGDF⁽⁷⁾ go further, and state high-risk feet should be checked daily for temperature anomalies.

The use of Thermography for daily feet checks, provides instant, highly intuitive, and quantitative data on areas of stress, pre-clinical infections, and vascular disease, all of which are invisible to the naked eye.

It transforms reactive care into a proactive, systematic approach to preventative care, effectively managing and minimising the impact of diabetes, reducing ulcerations and hospitalisations, and eases the burden on caregivers.

A Thermidas thermal tablet makes daily foot screening a much simpler, more efficient, and effective process, and becomes a time-saving tool.

In addition to DFUs, Thermidas thermal tablets can be used for the screening and management of multiple morbidities including Pressure Injuries, pain, arthritis, pre-clinical infections, PAD, Charcot Foot, Osteomyelitis, DVTs, and thermal comfort, making it an incredibly versatile and cost-effective tool.

Thermography will help care homes operators meet The Enhanced Health in Care Homes Framework⁽⁸⁾, a key expectation of which is to minimise unplanned hospital admissions by proactive, personalised care.

Moreover, with regards to pain and PIs, multiple studies⁽⁹⁾ have shown that medical thermography can objectively and accurately identify pain and PIs in the form of thermal anomalies long before any visual symptoms, allowing carers to immediately implement procedures to reduce pain or mitigate pressure injuries. In one study⁽¹⁰⁾, thermography predicted 100% of PIs that developed, including anatomical location.

These studies recommend the application of thermography into routine pressure injury risk assessment to provide highly efficient, timely and reliable alerts for care practitioners.

They emphasise that thermography provides quantitative data to objectively monitor the temperature and area of pressure injuries, and that it’s use as an adjunctive method for the evaluation of the healing process, removes any subjectivity in the assessment and monitoring of PI risk.

These studies also testify that the learning curve for thermal imaging is fairly short, and after initial support and training, a thermal system will rapidly become a timesaving and cost-efficient tool delivering enhanced residential care.

Finally, it is well documented that early signs of pressure injuries or DFUs are less easily identified in residents with darkly pigmented skin, but it should be noted, that the clinical utility of thermography is entirely unaffected by skin colour⁽¹¹⁾.