OAK BROOK, Ill. and BATESVILLE, Ind., May 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Diane Whitworth has been named the Nurse
Safety Scholar-in-Residence by Joint Commission Resources (JCR) and
Hill-Rom ( HRC). JCR is a not-for-profit affiliate of The
Joint Commission. Hill-Rom is a global medical technology
company.
Whitworth is a certified wound, ostomy and continence nurse
(CWOCN) with more than 30 years of clinical experience. She
is currently responsible for the wound care team at Bon Secours St.
Mary’s Hospital, a 391-bed acute care hospital and magnet
designated facility in Richmond,
Va.
Recognizing the important role that nurses play in translating
evidence-based findings into excellent care at the patient’s
bedside, the Nurse Safety Scholar-in-Residence program, in its
second year of a three-year project, focuses on developing tools
and best practices to maintain skin integrity and to prevent
pressure ulcers. An estimated 2.5 million patients are
treated annually for pressure ulcers in acute care facilities in
the United States, according to
studies published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association in 2003 and 2006. A December 2008 report by the Healthcare Cost
and Utilization Project (HCUP) states that in 2006 there were
503,000 hospital stays with pressure ulcers noted as a diagnosis,
nearly an 80 percent increase since 1993. Lengths of stay,
discharges to long term care settings, average patient age, and
mortality were all higher in patients with pressure ulcers than in
those without. Pressure ulcers are among the preventable
conditions and events on Medicare’s “no pay” list.
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