[Implementation of the National Expert Standard Prophylaxis of Pressure Ulcers in nurse practise - a cost-benefit...

By developing evidence-based, national Expert Standards, agreed-upon by an association of nursing professionals, the German Care Science participates in the international discussion. Up to now, five National Expert Standards on relevant care-related topics have been developed and have been widely implemented in Care Practice. However, sufficient evaluations of these Expert Standards are still required, especially from an economic perspective. The following paper addresses this topic by performing a cost-benefit analysis for the National Expert Standard Prophylaxis of Pressure Ulcers. The authors demonstrate which costs are caused by the implementation of this National Expert Standard for a residential care agency providing services. The benefit of the implementation of the Expert Standard is then being compared to its cost for a period of three years. The evaluation concludes that, in consideration of opportunity costs, the introduction of the National Expert Standard Prophylaxis of Pressure Ulcers appears economically viable for the residential care agency only if the rate of pressure ulcers in the reference agency can be lowered at least by 26.48%. In this case, when exclusively considering direct benefits and direct costs, a positive impact of the implementation will be achieved.