Critically ill patients with COVID-19 have a high risk for hospital-acquired pressure injury, but the Braden Scale only provides poor-to-fair predictive discrimination, according to a study published in AACN Advanced Critical Care. Jenny Alderden, PhD, and colleagues compared Braden Scale predictive validity between 1,920 patients with (N=407) and without COVID-19 and examined risk factors for device-related pressure injury. Among those with COVID-19, 29% developed at least one hospital-acquired pressure injury; of those, device-related pressure injury developed in 46%. The Braden Scale score area under the receiver operating characteristic curves were 0.72 and 0.71 in patients without and with COVID-19, respectively, indicating fair-to-poor discrimination. “Results from this study show that the Braden Scale lacked predictive validity in patients in the [ICU] with and without COVID-19 because of low specificity,” Dr. Alderden and colleagues wrote.
