Apex Pro-care mattress: How can this advanced mattress assist in prevention of pressure injuries?

Avalon Nursing Home is fully aware of the potential for pressure ulcers in immobile residents and were keen to undertake an evaluation to ensure their residents have the most appropriate care possible. They selected Apex Pro-care to evaluate as there were concerns for residents heels in those with any arterial insufficiency. The Apex Pro-care mattress has a heel section where one or more of the bottom five cells can be deflated under the patient's heel to create a void, which will enable the heel to "float" so that there is no pressure in contact with the heel area. The mattress would reduce the cost of nursing care as repositioning times can be optimised according to need. The three residents who agreed to evaluate the mattress found it to be extremely comfortable and they remained free of any pressure injury.

The Global Trachoma Mapping Project: Methodology of a 34-Country Population-Based Study.

PURPOSE: To complete the baseline trachoma map worldwide by conducting population-based surveys in an estimated 1238 suspected endemic districts of 34 countries. METHODS: A series of national and sub-national projects owned, managed and staffed by ministries of health, conduct house-to-house cluster random sample surveys in evaluation units, which generally correspond to "health district" size: populations of 100,000-250,000 people. In each evaluation unit, we invite all residents aged 1 year and older from h households in each of c clusters to be examined for clinical signs of trachoma, where h is the number of households that can be seen by 1 team in 1 day, and the product h × c is calculated to facilitate recruitment of 1019 children aged 1-9 years. In addition to individual-level demographic and clinical data, household-level water, sanitation and hygiene data are entered into the purpose-built LINKS application on Android smartphones, transmitted to the Cloud, and cleaned, analyzed and ministry-of-health-approved via a secure web-based portal. The main outcome measures are the evaluation unit-level prevalence of follicular trachoma in children aged 1-9 years, prevalence of trachomatous trichiasis in adults aged 15 + years, percentage of households using safe methods for disposal of human feces, and percentage of households with proximate access to water for personal hygiene purposes. RESULTS: In the first year of fieldwork, 347 field teams commenced work in 21 projects in 7 countries. CONCLUSION: With an approach that is innovative in design and scale, we aim to complete baseline mapping of trachoma throughout the world in 2015.