Preventing pressure ulcers at Beverly Hospital

She wanted to learn what strategies and tactics had worked for other organizations, but didn’t know where to start—until she learned her organization had an Advisory Board membership.

Stephanie connected with Anne, a researcher at Advisory Board and an expert on nursing. She sent Stephanie a study detailing nine proven strategies for preventing pressure ulcers, as well as an in-depth presentation of the study that her teammate recorded. Stephanie and her directors watched the presentation together and learned about best practices for training nurses, integrating staging guidelines into workflow, using the Braden scale to simplify interventions, and supporting their staff.

Armed with this new knowledge, they quickly built and implemented a strategy involving staff education, organization-wide collaboration, clear accountability and a culture of prevention. Specific tactics included:

• Clear care parameters — staff members now have crystal clear direction on turn frequency, and when to order specialized beds, a nutrition bundle, or incontinence care.
• Unambiguous accountabilities — every group touching patients has clear responsibilities. For example, ICU nurses must perform a head-to-toe skin check at every shift change.
• A daily discussion of high risk patients — every morning, a multidisciplinary team that includes nursing, wound care, nutrition, physical therapy and respiratory therapy discusses high-risk wound patients, reviews care parameters, and confirms accountability for each required care element.
• Wound Tuesdays — a nursing director conducts rounds on all wound patients every Tuesday, and teaches nurses in the moment. The wound care nurse takes pictures of all wounds an uploads them into the EMR.
• A human connection to the problem — nursing leaders remind all staff members to imagine how they would feel if their family members developed a preventable wound in a hospital. Repeated, empathic communication keeps staff from treating pressure ulcers like "just another work problem."

In their first month after implementing the new strategy and tactics, Stephanie’s hospital reported only 7 pressure ulcers—and after just six months, Beverly Hospital eliminated pressure ulcers completely.

Advisory Board researchers work with dozens of executives and clinicians at hospitals across the country to discover proven best practices. Together with our members, we created the standard to safeguard against pressure ulcers and patient falls.

Stephanie and her team used this research to create a plan that eliminated pressure ulcers within six months. With this study, you can eliminate never events too.