A pressure ulcer risk assessment tool developed in the United Kingdom continued to show promise.
Unlike the Braden scale, PURPOSE T does not use a score but rather encourages nurses to consider the profile of a patient’s risk across three groups: Not currently at risk, At risk or Existing pressure ulcer. It uses a color key, and its popularity has been growing throughout Europe since the metrics were published widely in 2015.
Swedish researchers tested the approach in two nursing homes and six hospital wards to measure staff use and comfort, reliability as measured by inter-rater and test-retest methods, and validity.
Scaling 235 patients, 28 nurses were found to conduct the clinical evaluation with “very good” reliability during PURPOSE T decision- making. The agreement of “at risk”/“not at risk” for both inter-rater and test-retest was 95.5%.
“There is a lack of evidence-based validated pressure ulcer risk assessment instruments for use in health care,” researchers from Sweden’s Uppsala University and the UK’s University of Leeds noted online this August in the Journal of Clinical Nursing.
From the September 2020 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News
