Pressure Ulcers: Assessing and Minimizing Risk to Improve Compliance

Compliance with the new Medicare payment rules and Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) 14 requires accurate assessment of pressure ulcer risk and skin condition, according to a pair of recent articles.

The first article, from the November 2008 issue of the American Journal of Nursing (van Rijswijk and Lyder), discusses how to assess patients for pressure ulcers and pressure ulcer risk in the emergency department (ED) to reduce the risk of missing a pressure ulcer that is present on admission. The authors...