Pressure Ulcer Case Study

Preventing Hospital-Acquired Pressure Ulcers

Pressure ulcers (PU) remain one of the relevant and persistent issues in a long-term hospital stay patients (Theisen, Drabik, & Stock, 2012). Although healthcare settings try to implement evidenced-based pressure ulcer protocols, hospitalized patients still continue to suffer from this prevalent and preventable injury. PU is a big challenge for many hospitals and they continue to strive to prevent this illness because most of the insurance companies stopped paying for this hospital acquired condition. Most of the hospital acquired pressure ulcers are preventable; however, despite some of the evidenced-based approaches made to prevent this persistent issue from the healthcare team, it continues to

Most hospital acquired pressure ulcers are preventable if the nurses in the unit play close attention to this particular illness. During my clinical rotation at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center, I found that with increasing obesity and aging, PU continues to be a challenge for the healthcare workers especially for the nurses despite following current research and evidenced-based treatment. The cost of PU to treat depends on various stages (stage-1 to stage-4). The average cost to treat stage-1 PU is over $2500, and the average cost to treat stage-4 PU is more than $22,000 (Spetz & Brown, 2013). PU is costly and causes an additional burden to healthcare facilities due to patients’ longer stay in the hospital. Without proper treatment, PUs can lead to sepsis and increases chances of mortality and morbidity rates in the hospitalized patients (Spetz & Brown, 2013). Besides pressure ulcers, these long-term hospital stay patients also suffer from pain and depression that affects their day-to-day quality of

The treatment of PUs can be a complex process because of several interplaying factors such as co-morbidities, immobility, age, spinal bifida, and other factors. (Porter, M., & Kelly, J., 2014). From the time of the admission, a proper risk assessment (Braden Risk Scores) and proper skin assessment, documentations, and the treatment goals needs to be established by the nurse (Qaseem, Mir, Starkey, & Denberg, 2015). In the Atlanta VA Medical Center, I came to know from the Nurse Educator that if PU is developed because of malnourished, diabetics, older age, obese, and long-term hospital bedbound patients, they were referred to wound care specialists and nutritionists for quality treatment and dietary education. Proper hospital protocols for regular skin inspection and intervention should occur at the units if the patients are at risk for developing PUs. It is in the care of bedside nurse and the wound nurse to prevent the illness by doing regular assessment for timely interventions (Varga,