Quality Improvement Project: Prevention of Pressure Ulcers

Quality Improvement Project: Pressure Ulcers
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Abstract
Pressure ulcers threaten the patients’ overall well-being in health facilities as these cause significant morbidity and mortality. The most commonly affected individuals are those who lack physical activity and mobility and with significant comorbidities. Due to the increasing incidence, it is critical to employ a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to view what is lacking and what could be done to reduce the incidence. This paper responded using an action plan based on the gathered data on the SWOT Analysis.
Prevention of Pressure Ulcers in Healthcare Facilities: A SWOT Analysis
Strengths
In reducing the incidence of pressure ulcers in healthcare facilities, health practitioners must provide an excellent and consistent assessment and adequate care. The principal strengths of the healthcare facilities include early identification of at-risk patients, knowledgeable health providers, and time management.
Initially, the Braden Scale should determine the risk of the patients admitted to developing pressure ulcers. This shall help identify these patients and aid the health providers, particularly the nurses, in monitoring them. One study has shown that the Braden Score is directly associated with the risk (i.e., the higher the score, the higher the risk) (Sundaram et al., 2017). Risk assessment should also include the risk factors such as physical inactivity or the lack of mobility, presence of ventilatory support, post-surgery, and congestive heart failure. Also, the most commonly affected areas must be noted. These are the bony prominences like the posterior scalp area and the sacrum (Smith et al., 2019; Borghardt et al., 2016).
Grešš Halász et al. (2021) reveal that the nurses’ knowledge and attitude are positively correlated with each other, and both are positively correlated with the incidence of pressure ulcers in the healthcare facility. Moreover, their level of knowledge is highly associated with their level of education. Therefore, highly skilled, trained, and educated nurses are more likely to have a positive attitude and response to the increasing incidence of pressure ulcers in patients in the healthcare facility than the rest. Additionally, one study has also shown that adequate exposure to the disease improves the nurses’ perceptibility and timely management since those who work less than or equal to eight hours daily are 2.57 times more likely to respond slowly to prevent ulcer formation (Muhammed et al., 2020).
Weaknesses
Currently, some of the challenges that hinder pressure ulcer prevention are the increased workload of the health providers secondary to a higher job burnout and turnover rate, leading to a high patient-to-health provider ratio, inadequate training, lack of appropriate equipment, and the nurses’ negative attitude towards the disease (Etafa et al., 2018).
Opportunities
There are opportunities to increase the awareness of the health providers and patients via high-technology interventions, improve the patient-to-health provider ratio, and employment of appropriate health equipment.