FOLEY — As of this week, Baldwin County residents no longer have to travel to Pensacola or Mobile to have wounds treated. That’s because South Baldwin Regional Medical Center opened its new Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine Center on Monday.

Situated in a wing of the Foley hospital, the 300,000 square-foot facility boasts four treatment rooms. It also houses an additional room containing two hyperbaric oxygen chambers.

“The chambers are 42X,” SBRMC CEO Keith Newton said at an open house of the facility Friday.

That means a person large enough to wear that size clothing could fit comfortably inside the chambers. And Center Director Stephanie T. Pierce said comfort is key for patients.

“We try to make them comfortable for a couple of hours,” she said Friday.

That’s because chambers are designed to blanket the patients with pure oxygen over a two-hour period as part of the wound-healing process. So to help with making that a comfortable experience, the chambers are see-through and equipped with televisions and entertainment systems.

Those provisions help ease the burden of healing such wounds as ulcers, skin tears, post-surgery and others.

“All types,” Center Medical Director Dr. William Garretson said Friday. “Radium, burn, trauma, wounds related to diabetes.”

But oxygen isn’t the only treatment patients receive. Six staff physicians are on hand to provide additional treatment, such as bandage changes, in any of the center’s new four treatment rooms.

“Local artists have decorated them with pictures of Baldwin County,” Pierce said of the rooms’ décor.

Newton began working on bringing the center, which costs upwards of seven figures, to Baldwin County more than a year ago.

“There’s a huge need for it in Baldwin County, with it being a fishing community and a rural community with diabetic patients,” he said.

That need is being met with a staff of five supporting the six physicians, who underwent a seven-day program of intensive training in Jacksonville, Fla.

“We’re the first and only wound-care center in Baldwin County,” Pierce said.

Efforts well spent, it seems, as the facility has hit the ground running.

“We already have several appointments,” Pierce said, explaining that appointments can be made by physician referral or by patients, themselves.

For more information about the Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine Center at SBRMC, call 251-949-3400 or visit www.SouthBaldwinRMC.com.