Visual monitors that cued staff to reposition nursing home residents every two hours led to more frequent turning in a study of a 120-bed nursing home.
Researchers at Duke University and other schools in North Carolina found use of the patient-monitoring system brought the facility closer to compliance with recommended two-hour turn rate, which could help prevent pressure ulcers.
Over an 18-day period, 44 residents were tracked by a sensor placed on their chests. If they hadn’t been repositioned for more than two hours, an LCD screen at a nurses station would turn red. As the need for a turn approached, a nurse would get a yellow warning. Otherwise, patients remained in the green. Self-positioning automatically reset the program.
On average, repositioning compliance was at 61.4% before the intervention started. During the study period, it averaged 81.5%, and the most significant improvements came during the overnight shift.
Residents with no risk or a severe risk of developing a pressure injury were excluded from the study.
The research team was led by Tracey Yap, Ph.D., RN, WCC, associate professor at Duke University School of Nursing.
“Our findings suggest that a [patient monitoring system] may be usable as a means to cue staff to comply with repositioning standards in LTC over the short term and that its implementation in an adaptive leadership context may improve elements of the occupational nursing culture and inform problem solving,” Yap wrote in the Journal of Wound Ostomy & Continence Nursing.
Another study is evaluating whether pressure injury rates could be further influenced by different turning intervals of two, four and six hours, with turns tracked by the same patient-monitoring system.
