Ongoing nursing training influence on the completion of electronic pressure ulcer records

Pressure ulcer (PU) care in nursing at the Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valladolid (HCUV) in Spain includes basic care and its registration through the electronic GACELA Care tool. To assess and evaluate the nursing intervention in PU evolution, a training programme was carried out to unify criteria on PU assessment, treatment, evaluation and monitoring.

To assess the influence of training on the completion of PU records in the GACELA Care application, and identify the level of satisfaction of the nurses after its use.

A quasi-experimental prospective study consisting of a specific training programme assessed pre- and post-training was carried out on the records of PU documentation at the HCUV. The PU records included in the study were collected using the electronic nursing healthcare management computer tool GACELA Care and belonged to patients admitted for >48h, excluding venous, arterial and stage I PUs. The pre-training sample consisted of 65 records collected between 1 April and 30 June 2014, and there were 57 post-training records, completed from 1 January to 31 March 2015. The training programme consisted of thirty-minute theoretical and practice training sessions. The study variables were ulcer type, location, stage, length and diameter, perilesional skin, cure type, products used and cure frequency, in addition to the number of actions taken in the records in correlation to the days of hospitalisation. To identify the nurses' opinions, a satisfaction survey about the management platform of ongoing Castilla y León training was administered.

The variations from the pre- to the post-training PU-sample completion rates were the following: from 23% to 40% for PU diameter, from 11% to 38% for PU length and from 57% to 79% for perilesional skin condition records. There was also a significant increase in the number of form updates after the training activity. The nurses' level of satisfaction with the training activity showed a positive outcome, with an average score of 8.84 over 10.

The training activity improved PU record completion significantly and was deemed positive by the nurses, mainly for its applicability in clinical practice.