Measuring Pressure Redistribution Properties of 4 Hospital Bed Surfaces: A Quality Improvement Project

Dr Holly Kirkland-Kyhn discusses a QI project conducted to measure pressure redistribution properties of hospital surfaces.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi, my name is Holly Kirkland-Kyhn. I’m a family and geriatric nurse practitioner working at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California. We’ve just finished a study here, and this was really a quality improvement project, looking for the best surfaces for pressure redistribution in the hospital. It’s Called Measuring Pressure Redistribution Properties of 4 Hospital Bed Surfaces, and we used eight volunteers.

The volunteers are from our lift team, so they're all big, hefty people who lift people all day. They’re strong. BMIs were mostly, I would say over 30, but I didn’t ask them that. We pressure mapped all of them and in different positions and on the different surfaces, just to make sure that we were going to pick the best surfaces for our patients here in the hospital.

The interesting findings were that, which is what we always find, is that air redistribution is probably the best thing to use and it is the cheapest.

We're going to have more pressure mapping studies coming out because we tend to use our pressure mapping machine a lot here to be able to have measurements on how people redistribute the pressure in both the OR on the different surfaces and in different positions. Thank you.