Pressure Injury Prevention in Aged Care

The impact of these poor standards within aged care services have been seen in many cases. One case is a retired labourer, Eric, who became immobile due to a rare neurological condition and stayed in his local Port Augusta aged care facility where they failed to provide proper treatments including treating his pressure injury. It was claimed that there was insufficient staff, knowledge, and capacity to treat Eric’s wound, causing him a cavity so deep to the point that one could see his spine – almost taking his life.

Unfortunately,  there are many aged care facilities that do not meet the standards set by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, despite being a significant indicator that these services must report on under the National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program (Egan, 2021).

A key to managing pressure injuries requires the patient to be turned from one side to another every 2 – 4 hours, depending on the patient, to alleviate the pressure on the skin and soft tissues. However, there are commonly not enough staff or nurses in most aged care facilities to fulfil this requirement. Moreover, the absence of legislation is causing a shortage of skilled nurses and staff in these facilities, making it more difficult to manage pressure injuries in senior residents effectively.

We, at Lenexa Medical, seek to solve this global issue by facilitating personalised connected care. The LenexaCARE^® system – a continuous-care patient monitoring and management system – converts a traditional mattress into a patient monitoring platform. It provides busy healthcare staff with the information they need to effectively manage PI care before they begin to develop.

Comprising a patented integrated fabric-based sensor, user interface and AI software, our technology will provide clinicians with non-subjective data to monitor patient position over time and indicate where the patient’s specific pressure areas are; effectively saving nurses’ time while providing accurate personalised data to enable early interventions and prevent pressure injuries from developing.