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Stitches Removal

After your wound care following any open wound injuries or post surgery, once your wound has stabilized and healed, you will need to remove your stitches.

To remove your wound stitches, you can either go to

• polyclinic (the most affordable, but also the longest wait)
  
• private GP (faster than polyclinic, but more pricey than polyclinic)
• specialist who did the procedure for you (most expensive and waiting time is varied)
• with us in Phoenix Rehab Group Singapore, which is appointment based (can be done in conjunction with hand therapy or physiotherapy with us too, which makes it more convenient)
  

Most of the time, it will be around 14 days to 21 days following the first stitching, for the wound to stabilize and then be ready for the stitches to be removed.

Stitches Removal
How It's Done

Doctors often abbreviate this procedure to "STO" which we think it's short for "sutures take out", and stitches removal are done using a STO Removal Set, which contains:

• tweezers
• sharp medical scissors (in some cases, some practitioners prefer using a blade to cut the stitches)
  

We use the tweezers to secure and hold the stitch in place, then slip in the medical scissors between the knot and cut the specific knot, and then with the same tweezers, we will remove the cut suture.

Depending on the size and complexity of the sutures removal, it'd take around 5-10 minutes at most.

stitches removal: possible complications

Some complications include:

1. stitches being "stuck" or adhered to the healed scarring/skin, and this commonly happens. We will have to give a little massage and tug, and it should come loose
2. dissolvable stitches not dissolving well - we will then have to remove them if the scar has formed and wound has healed well, but the presence of the dissolvable stitch may cause very small wound/slowed healing
3. when removing the stitch, it starts to bleed. Mild and painless bleeding is fine and common.
4. if the wound "didn't stick well enough" and starts to gape, we may have to put on special tape to keep both ends of the wounds together

summary

Once the stitches are successfully removed, then you can continue with hand therapy and/or physiotherapy to work on

• pain management
• scar management (scars will form after an injury or surgery; some patients may be prescribed scar creams by their doctor or buy scar creams online)
  
• range of motion
• power / strength
• stamina / endurance / activity tolerance