Pressure Ulcers Nursing Plan
The information provided by the dashboard shows several conditions that patients suffer from and their development over one year. During the one year depicted by the dashboard data, different health conditions developed differently in the health care facility. Some grew while others receded. There are various reasons why the data behaves the way it did during the one year that they were under investigation. This paper will look at facility acquired pressure ulcers and how it grew or receded among patients over one year. A nursing plan will also accompany this paper to showing how evidence-based literature can be used to deal with facility-acquired pressure ulcers.
Before delving into the nursing plan and the dashboard data analysis, it is important to understand the meaning of facility-acquired pressure ulcers. Facility-acquired pressure ulcers are ulcers that patients suffer during their stay at a hospital when they are inpatient. They are also known as hospital-acquired pressure ulcers because patients mostly stay at hospitals when they receive inpatient treatment. However, the term facility can refer to any other place where a patient can receive inpatient treatment that is not necessarily a hospital. An example is a home for the elderly where the elderly get their end-of-life care.
During inpatient treatment, patients do not have a lot of freedom. In some cases, the patients may be in very critical conditions such as intensive care units or comas. As such, their freedom of movement is limited by their current health condition. A person in a coma remains unconscious and, therefore, immobile. This means that such a person can only be moved. He cannot say when or if he wants to be repositioned. A person in the intensive care unit is also the same because most of them are normally under a lot of pain that they are put to sleep to help them feel less pain (Smith & Field, 2019). Such people cannot move by themselves, and they also cannot be moved frequently. The other functions of the body continue working despite being unconscious, and parts of the body develop pressure ulcers.
Normal patients that get inpatient treatment also develop pressure ulcers the same way that the critical patients do. They may have the freedom to stand up or sit down and lie on their bed, but they may be too weak to perform them by themselves; thus, they may end up getting pressure ulcers (Smith & Field, 2019). From the dashboard, the data does not say the type of patients in the data. Thus, this paper will assume that the patients in the data were conscious while developing pressure ulcers.
The data does not show any correlation between the number of hours worked by a nurse and the number of pressure ulcers reported. It also does not show any relationship with the number of patients reporting pressure ulcers. The number of ulcers is supposed to reduce with the number of nursing hours that a patient gets in a day increases. The data shows a continuous decrease in the patients that report pressure ulcers and the number of ulcers reported during the one year that the data was collected. However, it does not show the cause of the pressure ulcer. It also does not show any correlation between the number of ulcers and any other variable. A nursing care plan for the patients that develop pressure ulcers is as below.
| Nursing Intervention | Rationale |
| Air mattress | Air mattress is filled with air and, therefore, a patient floats on the cushion, never truly touching the metallic and other hard parts of the bed. This is unlike a normal foam mattress where heavy parts of the body of a patient get pressed on the hard parts of the bed, therefore, creating pressure ulcers (Smith & Field, 2019). |
| Turning and repositioning after at most 2 hours | When a patient lies on the bed for a long time, even if the mattress is soft, he is bound to get pressure ulcers. The reason is due to the weight of his body, pressing against a small part of his body. The part that is touching the mattress which is also the heaviest part of the body will experience the highest pressure and is likely to get pressure ulcer (Mcgraw, 2011) |
| Skin barrier cream | Skin barrier cream is a cream applied to the skin area that will experience a lot of pressure while lying on the bed. Such creams as Lantiseptic may help prevent the formation of pressure ulcers (Stansby et al., 2014). However, after a pressure ulcer has developed, antibiotics and antimicrobials are normally used. |
| Prophylactic pressure dressings | Pressure dressings are effective in preventing and treating pressure ulcers. Some of the dressing types include hydrocolloid dressings, foams, and films (Stansby et al., 2014). Alginate dressings are used to treat pressure because they contain calcium and sodium, which speed up the healing process. Hydrocolloid has a gel that helps damaged skin recover quickly. |
| Increase fluid and nutrition | Water is good for the body and will speed up the healing process of damaged skin or prevent the skin from getting injured. Eating a healthy diet with enough proteins, vitamins, and minerals can help strengthen the skin and protect it from damage (Thomas, 2013). |
| Debridement and Surgery | In cases where pressure ulcers have developed, the regions of dead tissue can be removed to encourage new ones to grow. However, if the pressure ulcer is severe, surgery may be an option for treating the ulcer (Stansby et al., 2014). |
References
Mcgraw, C. (2011). Repositioning for treatment of pressure ulcers. Primary Health Care, 21(9), 14-14. DOI:10.7748/phc.21.9.14.s15
Smith, B., & Field, L. (2019). Pressure ulcers. Nursing Care, 251-272. DOI:10.4324/9780429424182-9
Stansby, G., Avital, L., Jones, K., & Marsden, G. (2014). Prevention and management of pressure ulcers in primary and secondary care: Summary of NICE guidance. BMJ, 348(Apr23 1). DOI:10.1136/bmj.g2592
Thomas, D. R. (2013). The Role of Nutrition in the Management and Prevention of Pressure Ulcers. Pressure Ulcers in the Aging Population, 127-142. DOI:10.1007/978-1-62703-700-6_8