Cost of Pressure Ulcers
There are many excellent studies and reviews of the origin, treatment and costs of Pressure Ulcers in Long Term Care situation. This is a calculator to estimate the costs of Pressure Ulcers in your nursing home. You enter the planned costs in the table at the bottom of the page. These costs will stay in your computer. No data from this page is sent outside your computer. It's local and private. You need to print the spreadsheet, as it is not stored.
Pressure Ulcers have more costs if they are at a higher Stage, and more again if they have complications. You enter those costs in the table at the bottom of the page.
The Table above calculates to cost per week of pressure ulcers in this home. The first column is all the pressure ulcers in the home, and the second column just the ones that have complications like infections. If there are 2 Stage II ulcers and one of them is infected the entries are 2 and 1.
Obviously the costs will vary with the number (percentage) of residents with pressure ulcers and the distribution of the stage and complications of those ulcers. An infected ulcer requires more nursing care and materials than a naturally healing one. A stage 4 costs more than a stage 2. The main goal is to reduce the number of new ulcers, to heal those already there and to prevent those that are there from getting worse. The main resource for achieving these goals is skilled nursing time. Skilled nursing is also the strongest force stopping new pressure ulcers from appearing.
cost and time parameters
We start off with a set of cost and time parameters which is little more than an average educated guess. It's easy to insert values that you think are nearer the mark. Choose a kind of average cost for nursing depending on how much of the different nurses time is spent on Pressure Ulcer care. The dressings cost obviously varies with the patient and the severity of the wound. The purpose here is to get a meaningful number, meaningful to your residence. The 'nursing time' is in minutes per day per case. You can of course change the cost and time parameters at any time, but if you make the changes when you change the protocols, you'll see the effects of the new protocols, especially in reducing the number and severity of the wounds.
