Pressure Ulcer Prevention
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INCOMPLETE EVALUATIONS ARE INSUFFICIENT
A common problem in nursing homes is that facilities set this stage incompletely. At a minimum, nursing staff should assess an existing PU for four characteristics:
- wound location
- depth, or stage
- size
- necrotic tissue
In a recent evaluation, we found that nursing home staff documented all four wound characteristics for just 38% of 120 residents with PUs (1). The two most commonly charted characteristics were wound location and stage, which is a measure of the wound's depth. Both are important: Location can impact clinical interventions and stage is useful for diagnostic purposes. But even when considered together, these characteristics are insufficient to direct an effective treatment plan, or achieve recommended evaluation goals; additional wound characteristics must also be assessed so that clinicians can evaluate and predict time to healing.
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