The risks in nursing interventions offered by nurses with the purpose of preventing hospital-acquired pressure ulcers

Abstract The study was performed in seven medical units in Bucharest with the intention to offer a comprehensive analysis of the nurses’ current prevention practices for hospital-acquired pressure ulcers and also to determine: (1) the main risks that can negatively affect the prevention activities for this type of injury, and (2) if there is a correlation between the nurses’ knowledge and the clinical approach to the current hospital-acquired pressure ulcer prevention practices. The statistical analysis was based on data collected from 713 questionnaires from subjects who met the inclusion criteria of the study. The results showed that nurses considered protocols for hospital-acquired pressure ulcer prevention and its management to be important, but both were not always fully implemented into practice due to the lack of resources, time allocation and staff shortages. The regression analysis method we used was focused to assess the predictive capacity for the combined clinical knowledge and professional approaches to hospital-acquired pressure ulcer prevention and management. The conclusion was that a simultaneous improvement in the clinical approaches and professional knowledge on the topic of pressure-ulcer prevention and management may lead to an improvement of up to 6% of the practices in this field according to the results of the statistical analysis performed.