Pressure Ulcer Research Paper

In the United States pressure ulcers affect 3 million adults across the health care setting. Pressure ulcers have a major impact on quality of life, health status, and the cost of health care. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that they will not pay for additional costs due incurred for hospital-acquired pressure ulcers. They consider pressure ulcers acquired after admission to be preventable and will not reimburse hospitals for pressure ulcer treatment, these are considered secondary diagnoses and not their main reason for admission.1 Patients that are non-ambulatory due to physical or medical reasons are at a high risk for developing pressure ulcers with the highest incidence being in the ICU setting because
These numbers for the study were intentionally chosen to be statistically significant, yet small enough to be adequately monitored.
Patients having severe spinal injuries which prevented them from being repositioned, patients with existing heel pressure ulcers, or under the age of 18 were purposefully excluded from this study. The remaining trauma and critically ill patients admitted to the hospital were the pool from which the study participants were selected.
The data collected for this study includes patient physiological variables, the reason for admission, comorbidities, the patients' length of stay in the emergency department, operating room, and intensive care unit (in hours). Monitoring of patient Braden scores daily and examination of patients heels every 24 hours for the length of the study were conducted by research team members. Inter-rater reliability testing was done on all members of the research team prior to the implementation of this study.
The limitations in this study could be that the control group and the study group came from two (2) separate studies that were conducted at different times. Another limitation to be considered was that this study was only conducted at the Royal Melbourne