Repositioning Guidelines to Decrease Pressure Injury in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit: A Quality Improvement Project.

Purpose: The purpose of this quality improvement (QI) project was to develop and implement repositioning guidelines that reduce pressure injury (PI) in hemodynamically unstable pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) patients.

Participants and setting: All PICU patient ages 0 to 36 months who required sedation for invasive mechanical ventilation and had a Braden Q score ≤ 18 were eligible for inclusion. The project was implemented in 116 patients preimplementation and 100 postimplementation. Their median t age was 5 months (interquartile range 2-13 months). The QI project setting was an academic hospital PICU with a Level I trauma center located in the Mid-Atlantic Region of the United States.

Approach: A pre-post observational design was used to compare the at-risk population for 21 weeks before (August-December 2018) and after (August-December 2019) implementing repositioning guidelines. Turn attempts were undertaken every 2 hours. Repositioning attempts were defined as (1) full (30°); (2) partial (15°); (3) unable to turn owing to hemodynamic instability; or (4) noncompliance. The primary outcome was incidence of Stage II or higher PI.

Outcomes: We found a significant reduction in the incidence of PI before and after implementation of the repositioning intervention (16.4% vs 2.0%, P = .0003).

Implications for practice: A structured intervention for repositioning hemodynamically unstable PICU patients has the potential to significantly lower PI incidence in a group of hemodynamically unstable children.