Massachusetts hospitals today are revealing the rates of pressure ulcers their patients have acquired during hospital stays, another in a series of statistics made public by the Massachusetts Hospital Association on its Patients First website.
Falls by patients in the hospital and nurse staffing plans were previously posted.
The data on pressure ulcers, or bed sores, were gathered during two days in March and September 2007 when nurses did full-body examinations of their patients. Pressure ulcers are a particular danger to certain patients, such as diabetics with circulation problems, paraplegics, or trauma patients immobilized on ICU ventilators.
Pressure ulcers are a good measure of nursing and hospital quality, said Carol Haraden, vice president of the Cambridge-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The sores can become serious after skin breaks down from pressure, moisture, or abrasion, later destroying muscle and bone.
"In people who are prone to them, their ability to heal from them is often impaired," making prevention critical, she said.
The hospital group took data from the state's 80 acute care, rehabilitation, and long-term acute hospitals and divided the reports by the units where patients were cared for: intensive care, "step-down," medical, surgical, or medical-surgical units. Patients in step-down units require less monitoring than when they were in the ICU but more than in a regular bed.
The hospital rates are compared with state averages for hospitals of similar size and type, a way to account for how sick patients are, said Karen Nelson, MHA senior vice president for clinical affairs of the Massachusetts Hospital Association. The measures follow criteria used by the National Quality Forum, a health quality measurement organization.
For people using the Patients First website, patientsfirstma.org, it isn't easy to compare hospitals head to head, which is what the group intended, Nelson said. Its goal is to encourage improvement by individual hospitals, although she conceded that patients might want to see how hospitals rank.
"Going public with data like this, whether it's nurse staffing plans or falls or pressure-ulcer prevalence, is really to provide the public with the information about how hospitals are doing and shining a light on things important to patients and their families," she said. "The other audience we also are looking at with this are the hospitals, so they learn from each other."
Only two hospitals had rates significantly above average.
