Search Results for: "Pressure Ulcers"

Pressure ulceres are a serious health issue for patients in all kinds of settings, even at home. The good news is that most pressure ulcers can be prevented. What’s needed is awareness on the part of patients and health-care professionals about prevention and maintaining a commitment to the actions required to do so. The Canadian Association of Wound Care has designed a pressure ulcer awareness and prevention program. It includes the tools necessary to reduce the numbers of pressure ulcers in all types of settings across Canada.

Linking practice to current evidence-based wound care guidelines is a challenge for healthcare professionals, especially because of the quantity of wound care guidelines available. In 1999, the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario, Canada, with funding from the Province of Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, established a process for the development and implementation of 17 best practice guidelines to support nurses using evidence-based practice. Four of the 17 guidelines pertain to wound care. The consensus development, pilot testing, and evaluation process of one of the guidelines, Risk Assessment and Prevention of Pressure Ulcers in Adults, is described. Following a comprehensive and systematic search for existing guidelines, a formal quality appraisal of five selected guidelines, decisions for adoption and/or adaptation of best practice recommendations, and stakeholder feedback on the draft guidelines, a pilot implementation testing of the guidelines was conducted. In early 2002, the nursing best practice guideline was disseminated through conferences, publications, and the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario website www.rnao.org.

Clinicians working in wound care appreciate how life for individuals with wounds is disrupted by care, cost issues, and the pain associated with treatment. Although managing pressure ulcers is often a passion for wound care specialists, the majority of the population is unaware of the challenges involved and many healthcare professionals place little emphasis on identifying and treating skin ulcers. The number of individuals seeking wound care services continues to grow, which suggests that pressure ulcers are a relatively common healthcare concern and an escalating problem. Statistics are available regarding the number of pressure ulcers in the US as well as for other countries of the world. However, little information is available about the number of individuals in Canada who have pressure ulcers. National estimates for the number of pressure ulcers in various healthcare settings in regions across Canada are nonexistent. Without this information, estimating costs to the Canadian healthcare system associated with managing chronic wounds is not possible.

In this article, the Canadian Association of Wound Care puts for- ward 12 recommendations for best practices in the prevention and treatment of pressure ulcers that focus on an interdisciplinary patient-centered approach. These recommendations are a synthesis of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research guidelines, European guidelines, and current literature as interpreted by the Canadian experience and achieved through a national consensus panel. The article concludes that best practice guidelines must be fluid documents that respond to new evidence and experience.

This nursing best practice guideline is a comprehensive document providing resources necessary for the support of evidence-based nursing practice. The document needs to be reviewed and applied, based on the specific needs of the organization or practice setting/environment, as well as the needs and wishes of the client. Guidelines should not be applied in a “cookbook” fashion but used as a tool to assist in decision making for individualized client care, as well as ensuring that appropriate structures and supports are in place to provide the best possible care.