The Effect of Support Surfaces in the Incidence of Pressure Injuries in Critically Ill Patients: a Randomized Clinical Trial

Detailed Summary

The presence of pressure injuries has been considered a quality indicator of health care services and efforts has been made to develop guidelines to prevent this issue. Intensive care unit admissions (ICU) are recognized as risk factors to develop pressure injuries due to reduced mobility of critically ill patients and large number of devices and hard technologies that jeopardize preventive measures, such as, decubitus changes. There are not current definitive evidence about the superiority of any support surface to treat or prevent pressure injuries. The objective of the present study is to analyze if the use of viscoelastic support surface in vulnerable critically ill patients decreases the incidence of pressure injury compared with pyramidal foam support surface. Randomized clinical trial performed in an intensive care unit for adult patients in a philanthropic hospital. Inclusion criteria are patients admitted to ICU with Braden scale ≤ 14. Exclusion criteria are age under 18 years, less than 24 hours of ICU length of stay, contraindication of performing complete institutional preventive measures for support injuries, presence of support injuries at ICU admission or absence of informed consent. Randomization will be made by computerized generated numbers and patients will be allocated in two groups in a ratio of 1:1. All study patients will be cared for according to standard institutional preventive measures. The interventional group will be placed in an ICU bed with viscoelastic support surface and the control group in an ICU bed with pyramidal foam support surface. The main outcome evaluated will be the occurrence of type II pressure injury. Secondary outcomes are the time to the occurrence of pressure injury, length of ICU and hospital stay and 28 days mortality rate. Significance level will be 5%.

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