The Impact of Braden Scale Education on Nurses’ Knowledge Regarding Its Use

Abstract

The Braden Scale is a widely used assessment tool to predict the pressure injury risks and prevent pressure injuries in patients. The nurses’ knowledge of how to use the Braden Scale is essential to facilitate the effectiveness of this tool and to properly reduce inconsistencies among nurses’ skin assessment and the Braden scores. The senior management team in a 260-bed hospital in California recently decided to implement a quality improvement (QI) project on the use of the Braden Scale. This QI project aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational course that focused on improving the registered nurses’ (RNs) knowledge regarding the use of the Braden Scale. The QI project’s design incorporated a series of pretest surveys, an intervention, and then immediate posttest and six weeks post-test surveys on a convenience sample. The RNs on the ICU and telemetry units at the project hospital were able to volunteer for the project. The project used a short educational session that lasted about 10 to 15 minutes and was delivered mostly to individual nurses during their morning breaks or lunch breaks. This QI project found that the individual nurse barriers to implement EBP changes may be modified and improved through educational training. In general, there were the most improvements in the scores between the pre-educational survey and the immediate post educational survey. There were also great improvements from the pre-educational survey to the six-weeks post educational survey. There were several limitations to this QI project including convenience sample, small sample size of 63 RNs, the short duration of the project leading to unknown long term knowledge retention, and the bias of immediate recall of information. The project’s educational technique provided a chance for the educator to customize the material to meet the learner’s needs and delivered a significant improvement for post educational survey scores. This educational technique is recommended for future nursing education that involves EBP changes.