Michael Jarom Staheli
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 0
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Background: Annually, more than 2.5 million individuals in the United States are diagnosed with pressure ulcers, leading to painful experiences, a decline in quality of life, and heightened healthcare expenses. These chronic wounds can significantly impact a patient's mobility and often reappear. Advanced chronic conditions, such as malnutrition, anemia, recurrent infectious diseases, polypharmacy, and hospitalizations, can frequently lead to pressure ulcers. The project site is a clinic specializing in wound care services, providing treatments at patients' residences or wherever they may reside, focusing on wound care treatments for all parts of the body, and accepting patients regardless of their insurance or provider status. The clinic collaborates with individuals, home health, hospice, and residential care facilities. EBP Framework: Lewin's theory of planned change and Johns Hopkins nursing evidence-based practice model worked as the framework for this quality improvement project. This project aims to improve wound healing documentation consistency. The two complement each other in identifying a problem, sorting the evidence, formulating a plan, and evaulating the outcomes to ensure continued use. Methods: This quality improvement project's main objective is to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of an assessment tool called the Pressure Ulcer Scale of Healing (PUSH), which focuses on documentation and tracking the healing rate in pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers, and venous stasis ulcers at a home visit based wound care company. Once the Institutional Review Board (IRB) was obtained, provider in-service education occurred. The project participants' sample size was (n=3) comprised of nurse practitioners at the wound care company. Project outcomes were designed and measured from pre- and post-surveys and Electronic Health Record (EHR) data retrieval. Findings/Results: Using the PUSH tool, the McNemar test on paired proportions is used to test the difference between the 1-4-week post-intervention and the 5-8-week continuation phase. The results have a difference of 65.41% with a 95% confidence interval of 58.19% to 72.64% and an extract probability of p