Pressure area care

[dibaby]

Hello,

I'm a night sister in a nursing home in the UK. To prevent pressure sores while residents are in bed sleeping we use various pressure relieving aides and mattresses. We also turn very vunerable residents 2 hourly. This disturbs their sleep. Does anyone out there think that turning this frequently is over the top and is there any research I might find useful on this particular topic. Turning 3 hourly in most cases would be better.......yes?

[ebbarton]

dibaby---q2h at night does seem a bit much. We usually turn q2 during the day/eve and q4 at night except for incontinence care, etc.

Can't identify research for you from here in the colonies but you might try the vendor's agents for your various pressure relieving devices as well as for your wound care products. Here, they are generous with reprints, etc etc. Are the US journals hard to get there???

You also might try www.nursingspectrum.com for case studies/bulletin boards/discussion groups.

Good luck, and please do let me know how you do with this.

[dibaby]

Hi,

thanks for your response. We can get US publications here, I can view them at the college of nursing library. Thanks for the hints, I'll let you know how I get on.

dibaby.

[Cindy Johnston]

I am soon getting back into geriatric nursing, but when I was previously a charge nurse on a skilled nursing facility we handled each client differently...We used the standard of every 2 hours, but if we had someone with little or no skin breakdown and they were sleeping well, we felt the sleep to be of great importance to their mental and physical well-being and would let them sleep, many who had a tendency toward incontinence eventually stirred, if wet and we would try to catch them and do incont. care and turn them at the same time. Bottom line is it is good to have standards, but we need to use nursing judgement and individualize the care for each client...On rare occasions we would have someone with terrible breakdown and freq. incontinence and have to turn them more than once every 2-3 hours...did that help or validate any?