Uses

The objective of Skin Bank is met when the skin saved is well utilised by the doctors treating the Burns and trauma victims who have lost the skin in the unfortunate incident or accident. Rotary Ashirvad BMCRI Skin Bank is established by its conceiver’s with a firm resolve to be able to save enough processed ready to use skin in the Bank to supply any number of requests from any Hospital anywhere in Bangalore, Karnataka and even its neighbouring states.

If all the Plastic Surgeons in Bangalore, Karnataka and even the neighbouring states treating burns switch their traditional method of treating burns to modern early excision of burn skin and cover the raw areas with Cadaveric skin from Rotary Ashirvad BMCRI Skin Bank, its primary objective is met. The donors and supporters of RAB Skin Bank have made a commitment to keep up the effort until such an objective is met.

Uses of Skin

You may understand the importance of the SKIN BANK, when you learn the uses/functions/role of Skin and how important it is in our lives.

Skin performs the following functions:  
• Protection: an anatomical barrier from pathogens and damage between the internal and external environment in bodily defense;
• Sensation: contains a variety of nerve endings that react to heat and cold, touch, pressure, vibration, and tissue injury; In partial thickness burns or trauma, it exposes the pain nerve endings causing excruciating pain.
• Heat regulation: precise control of energy loss by radiation, convection and conduction. Dilated blood vessels increase perfusion and heat loss and conserve heat.
• Control of evaporation: the skin provides a relatively dry and semi-impermeable barrier to fluid loss. Loss of this function contributes to the massive fluid loss in burns.
• Storage and synthesis: acts as a storage center for lipids and water, as well as a means of synthesis of vitamin D by action of UV on certain parts of the skin.
• Excretion: sweat contains urea, however its concentration is 1/130th that of urine, hence excretion by sweating is at most a secondary function to temperature regulation.
• Absorption: the cells comprising the outermost 0.25–0.40 mm of the skin are “almost exclusively supplied by external oxygen”, although the “contribution to total respiration is negligible”. In addition, medicine can be administered through the skin, by ointments or by means of adhesive patch, such as thenicotine patch or iontophoresis. The skin is an important site of transport in many other organisms.
• Water resistance: The skin acts as a water resistant barrier so essential nutrients are not washed out of the body.

Hence the Skin donated by you also called as ALLOGRAFT would be used to cover the raw areas after burns and trauma to protect the body and serve as best biological dressings until the patient’s condition stabilises and ready for the definitive treatment.

However, the Allograft thus used although accepted by the patient’s body temporarily, will eventually get’s rejected by the patient’s immune system. Although it is not the definitive or final treatment but it does make difference between life and death by stabilising the patient’s otherwise critical condition by avoiding the heat loss, water loss, infection etc., until the time body is stable which is usually take first few weeks.