Mānuka honey dressings

To develop the ideal honey wound dressing, Professor Peter Molan talked to nurses working in woundcare. What did they want?

Transcript

Peter Molan (University of Waikato): When I first got clinical people interested in trying honey - this was the dermatology department of Waikato Hospital - they got cases that nothing else was working on. They used honey on those, and they were pleased with the healing starting in those patients. But it wasn’t as fast as I would have expected.

When I looked at what they’d been doing - they’d just been putting the honey straight onto the wound and covering it with a bandage - I realised what was happening. The honey wasn’t being kept there.

And the nurses said: ‘Yeah, they’re great results. We’re pleased to see patients healing when nothing else is working, but we’re not going to mess around putting sticky messy honey on that’s running off. We want something we can rip out of a packet and stick straight onto a wound’.

I was then left with the challenge of finding some way of getting honey into a dressing like that. My first inspiration was just seeing my wife using cotton wool make up removal pads.