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Bridget M. Kuehn

JAMA. 2009;301(4):370.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

The number of hospital stays involving pressure ulcers increased by nearly 80% between 1993 and 2006, from 281 300 to 503 300, according to an analysis by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The analysis, based on data from the 2006 Nationwide Inpatient Sample, a nationally representative database of US hospital stays, raises questions about the quality of patient care (http://www.hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb64.pdf). In more than 90% of the cases, patients were admitted for the treatment of another disorder and a pressure ulcer was a secondary condition, suggesting it may have developed during the hospital stay.

Older individuals were disproportionately affected; patients older than 65 years represented 72% of hospitalizations involving a secondary diagnosis of pressure ulcer and 56.5% of those admitted primarily for this condition. Poorer outcomes also were associated with hospital stays involving pressure ulcers; more than half of patients with pressure ulcers were discharged to . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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