December 13, 2017 - Skilled Wound Care
Profiles In Caring: Dr. Bardia Anvar, CEO & Founder of Skilled Wound Care
Today we’re profiling the CEO & Founder of Skilled Wound Care, Dr. Bardia Anvar. Like all great healthcare superheroes, he too has an origin story. Here’s his account of how he got started, and what’s inspired him. What drove him to focus on bringing care to people who can’t access it? How did Skilled Wound Care get started? Read on to find out!
It was 1994, in college at UCLA; when I woke up at 4 AM, to drive to a remote village in Mexico with some fellow students and faculty advisors to provide a rural health clinic. We drove across the border to a village in Baja California called La Rumarosa (about halfway between Tecate and Mexicali). This was a deeply powerful experience, and I volunteered throughout college with this group - the Flying Samaritans. Helping people gain access to the care they needed (but couldn’t always get to themselves) became an early passion.
Fast forward 12 years later. I was a staff general surgeon in a Los Angeles hospital, and I remember waiting in the operating lounge for my next laparoscopic cholecystectomy to begin. It occurred to me that there was a group of people in a nursing home right across the street who were, in their own way, underserved in the area of wound care. At that time - 2007 - nursing home wound care patients were an almost entirely unserved population, but I thought I might be able to help. I started helping out, and I remember my first major breakthrough: I had a patient named Mr “Rivera,” (name changed for privacy reasons) who had a large wound on his sacrum, but couldn’t leave the facility to get the treatment he needed. I figured, if he can’t leave the facility, maybe we can help him right here. I decided to try performing bedside debridements to clean and freshen his wound, and I was thrilled to see it respond. Every week, I came to check on Mr. Rivera, and before long, his wound had rapidly improved. I started getting calls to look at other patients, and at other facilities, to help with their wounds, and that’s how the Skilled Wound Care practice started.
We’ve grown tremendously in the past ten years, and now, instead of just me, we have an entire physician group that treats over a thousand patients a week in nursing homes throughout the United States.
Our goal is to bring the highest quality wound care to some of the most vulnerable populations in the United States, to educate and build teams of caring, compassionate healthcare providers, and to continue to innovate and develop new healing techniques that generate better outcomes. From one person visiting a nursing home to a national company, we’re now casting our sights around the world, and can’t wait for the challenges and opportunities the next decade will bring!
Skilled Wound Care is a mobile surgical practice committed to transforming the chronic wound care model in nursing facilities. Wound care experts make weekly bedside visits to patients in long-term care facilities, avoiding transfers to hospitals or clinics. Our expert physicians give patients the most up-to-date and effective wound treatments, and educate facility staff on how to help patients continue to heal quickly and effectively between visits. This model of collaborative care allows SWC’s physicians to improve patients’ lives and health outcomes, to empower nursing staff, and to raise public awareness. Skilled Wound Care, along with its nurse and nursing home partners, is working every day to positively transform traditional nursing home wound care.