Improving pressure ulcer (PU) prevention has been a key quality driver for over a decade within all NHS provider organisations (Fletcher et al, 2021) with PU data being used to measure improvement.
In that time, PU data collection and reporting has become a time-consuming priority for many tissue viability specialist nurses who have been required to be responsible for PU classification, validation and allocation of attribution (Fletcher et al, 2021). These activities contribute little to patient care and reduce the amount of time tissue viability nurses can spend on preventing PUs. Individual organisations devote considerable time to deciding not only which data to capture, but also how they report it. This results in significant variation, so it is difficult to understand the true size of the problem at a national level.
