Drs. Phillip Ward and Anthony Haro, podiatrists at the Foot and Ankle Center of North Carolina in Pinehurst, recently returned from a week-long trip to Glasgow, Scotland, where they attended a course on wound healing and reconstruction of foot and ankle defects.

The course sponsored jointly by the University of Glasgow and the Canniesburn Plastic Surgery Unit was attended by specialists from 13 different countries. The content of the course dealt with techniques used to treat skin, soft tissue and bone defects. The course covered the entire body and had a special emphasis on the foot and ankle. The Pinehurst foot and ankle specialists performed cadaver dissection in the mornings and evaluated patients in the afternoons.

"The techniques we learned are literally cutting edge in the world and will give us the ability to offer new procedures to our patients who have difficult-to-heal wounds and ulcerations," Ward said. "Most of the advances in plastic surgery in the last 30 years have been developed at the Canniesburn Unit, and having the opportunity to train there was certainly a privilege"

Haro thinks that his patients will benefit from their training.

"We can now offer patients additional treatments and procedures to help prevent amputations," he said. "There is a tremendous incidence in the Sandhills of diabetic ulcerations, and now we have another array of treatments to offer these patients to help get these wounds healed."