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The perennial issue of measuring success in pressure ulcer prevention continues to pose considerable challenges. At the recent meeting of the World Union of Wound Healing Societies it was evident that despite our awareness, interest and expenditure on preventive care and interventions there remains scant evidence anywhere in the world that we are reducing the number of people who develop pressure ulcers. This could be for several reasons - ageing sicker populations, ineffective interventions or ineffective counting of pressure ulcers! There will be presentations during the forthcoming EPUAP conference upon the development of consensus in counting pressure ulcers and this will add to the existing guidance from the European Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel upon this thorny issue (www.epuap.org/review4_1/page6.html and http://www.epuap.org/review6_3/page5.html).
The EPUAP developed a minimum data set for the collection of pressure ulcer prevalence data and this can be downloaded from http://www.epuap.org/study/study.html. However the collection of prevalence data may not help us capture changes in the occurrence of pressure ulcers following preventive interventions and to do this we must grasp the issues involved in collecting and reporting incidence data. Without such data we will continue to flounder when attempting to show that through our efforts fewer people have pressure ulcers today than last year or ten years ago. In an evidence based culture that is simply unacceptable. It sometimes feels as though we have been saying the same things and writing editorials like this for decades and yet little changes. However the realisation that globally the available data does not provide evidence of improvements in pressure ulcer occurrence should, indeed must, prompt concerted action in this area.
At present there is a dearth of information upon how pressure ulcers are being monitored in the UK - are organisations counting prevalence, incidence, incidents or some mixture of these? Perhaps we can use this newsletter to begin to gain an impression of how pressure ulcers are being recorded? If readers could send any information upon how they collect pressure ulcer numbers this could be summarised in a future newsletter so that we can begin to see the approaches taken and perhaps learn from each other? If you could send any information to me via Wounds UK at ............. the October newsletter will attempt to summarise this information.
Michael Clark
Editor
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