Reducing hospital acquired pressure ulcers in intensive care

"The measures or changes to practice used to reduce hospital acquired pressure ulcers in the intensive care department achieved their goal and incidences of hospital acquired pressure ulcers decreased."

Reducing hospital acquired pressure ulcers in intensive care
E Cullen Gill
BMJ Quality Improvement Reports 2015;4: doi:10.1136/bmjquality.u205599.w3015

Read more here.

Pressure ulcers: NICE clinical audit tools

NICE have published two clinical audit tools for pressure ulcer prevention, one for paediatric care and one for adults.

"Clinical audit tools are Excel spreadsheets developed to help with clinical audit. They contain clinical audit standards, data collection sheets, a clinical audit report an action plan template and a printable data collection form.  When data is entered into the data collection sheets the audit results are automatically displayed in the audit report."

Access the tools and find out more here.

New patient-reported outcome measure for patients with pressure ulcers

"The PU-QOL instrument provides a standardised method for assessing PROs, reflecting the domains in a pressure ulcer-specific conceptual framework."

Development and validation of a new patient-reported outcome measure for patients with pressure ulcers: the PU-QOL instrument
C Gorecki, et al
Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 2013, 11:95

Read more here.

Making health care safer

The Annals of Internal Medicine have published a special edition reviewing the evidence supporting strategies to improve patient safety. The articles included in this issue are:

1. The top patient safety strategies that can be encouraged for adoption now promoting a culture of safety as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
2. In-facility delirium prevention programs as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
3. Patient safety strategies targeted at diagnostic errors: a systematic review 
4. Inpatient fall prevention programs as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
5. Medication reconciliation during transitions of care as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
6. Nurse–patient ratios as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
7. Preventing in-facility pressure ulcers as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
8. Rapid-response systems as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
9. Simulation exercises as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review
10. Hospital-initiated transitional care interventions as a patient safety strategy: a systematic review

Read the whole issue here.

'Harm free' care

This initiative is the national roll out of the pilot Safety Express QIPP programme. 'Harm free' care is defined by the absence of pressure ulcers, falls, urinary catheters, and venous thromboembolism, and this collection of resources and case studies has been developed to reduce these incidents.

Find out more and access all the resources here.

eLearning resources to improve patient care

The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement has formed a joint venture with Virtual College to develop the Productives e-learning suite. This suite is designed for staff, team leaders, programme managers and leaders to help them use The Productive Series: Releasing Time to Care (TM) programme. Read more here.

eLearning for Healthcare has developed "e-learning for Harm Free Care", an online educational resource designed to support frontline teams in delivering harm free care, as defined by an absence of four common harms: pressure ulcers, harm from falls, catheter acquired urinary tract infections (CaUTI) and venous thromboembolism (VTE).

Find out more here.