Hospital & Nursing Home acquired pressure ulcers kill 100,000 people per year.

A portion of the revenue from this site will be donated to the National Decubitus Foundation in Colorado, they are an organization that works tirelessly in the pursuit of bring total awareness of the problems and preventions of pressure ulcers to the medical community and the general public. Our family was touched personally by this, as my mom died from it 2 years ago after being admitted for a routine partial hip replacement but developed a pressure ulcer that was described as the worst one that anyone had seen. She, as a result from this ulcer, died a month later.

If you are interested at all in this subject, please feel free to click on the link below and see what the organization and it's founder, Edward Comfort, are all about. His mother also died as a result from a pressure ulcer.

http://www.decubitus.org/


The article below which appeared in the Wall Street Journal was provided to us by Edward Comfort, director of the National Decubitus Foundation.


"Hospitals around the country are scrambling to put new programs in place to prevent pressure ulcers, commonly known as bedsores, after the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced last month that as of October 2008, it will no longer reimburse hospitals for treating eight “reasonably preventable” conditions. Pressure ulcers are among the most prevalent, costly and dangerous on the list: In addition to interfering with recovery, lengthening hospital stays and causing extreme pain and discomfort, pressure ulcers can increase the risk of infection, with nearly 60,000 deaths annually from hospital-acquired pressure ulcers.

Nursing homes and long-term care facilities have made strides of their own in prevention, motivated in part by the costs of litigation for failure to prevent pressure ulcers. But in acute-care hospitals, where patients stay for much shorter periods, prevention has been sporadic.

Acute-care hospitals treat about 2.5 million pressure ulcers each year, and as many as 15% of hospitalized patients may have pressure ulcers at any one time, according to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Estimates for the cost of treating all pressure ulcers in the US range up to $11 billion annually.

To combat this, hospitals are pushing screenings of all incoming patients from head to toe for skin issues that could lead to pressure ulcers. They are using visual examinations, ultrasound and other technologies that can help identify skin with tissue damage. In some cases, they are photographing areas of a patient’s skin to document how it changes from day to day.

Hospitals are also buying special beds with high-tech air mattresses that minimize or redistribute pressure. And they are adhering to strict monitoring schedules that include shifting patients every two hours, frequently cleaning and moisturizing soiled or sensitive skin, and making sure that at-risk patients have enough protein and other nutrients in their diet to help the healing process.

Pressure ulcers are caused when skin lesions form near prominent bony parts of the body from unrelieved pressure when patients stay in one position for too long. Starting with skin redness or a blister, sores can progress to a deep crater that damages muscles, tendons and bone, requiring surgery and increasing the risk of complications such as the bloodstream infection sepsis. The late actor Christopher Reeve was being treated for an infection associated with a pressure ulcer when he died of cardiac arrest."

Wall St Journal September 5, 2007

Thank you Ed for providing this article for us.

Thank you shoppers,

Ronni Mandell