The Skin Safety Model: Prevention Of Ulcers

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Recommended: Issues with pressure ulcers in the clinical setting

Prevention of Ulcers
Currently health care facilities use individual, multi-component interventions, or series of interventions to prevent pressure ulcers. Either health care staff is not implementing these strategies into their patient’s care or some changes obviously need to be made. Interventions to prevent pressure ulcers consist of using the Braden Scale for initial and repeated skin assessments to determine the patient’s risks for pressure ulcers, specialized support mattresses, heel supports, and frequent repositioning for bed bound patients, encouraging mobility, moisture management, nutrition, hydration, and reducing friction or shear forces on parts of the body at increased risk for pressure ulcers (Sullivan & Schoelles, 2013).
Scales …show more content…

Using the Skin Safety Model (SSM), prevention of pressure ulcers can be shifted to a more holistic patient-centered approach. The SSM comprises of four sections, potential contributing factors to skin injury, exacerbating elements, potential skin injury, and potential outcomes of skin injury. Each section then has subcategories of determinants that can change depending on the patient’s specific circumstance. The SSM helps the caregiver look at the patient as a whole and incorporate all of the patient’s risk factors that could potentially lead to impaired skin integrity or pressure ulcers (Campbell, Coyer, & Osborne, …show more content…

This tool is geared towards the older adult population. When evaluating the effectiveness of this tool, all physiologic factors of the patient have to be considered. Skin assessments should be performed and risks identified that could contribute to a pressure ulcer. There is no financial increasing when implementing this evidence based practice. The Skin Safety Model is merely assessing the patient’s skin during routine assessments. Document progress is writing the progress or decline of the patient’s skin integrity in the chart. With this model, the outcome should overall be positive because this ensures that the patient’s risk factors are acknowledged and nurses are assessing patients

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