Barbara Bates-Jensen
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Pressure injuries are areas of damaged skin and underlying tissue that form over bony spots like the tailbone and heels when sustained pressure cuts off healthy tissue function. In nursing homes they are painful, expensive, linked to worse quality of life and higher death rates, and largely preventable.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
pressure injury
pressure ulcer
subepidermal moisture
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether subepidermal moisture readings of residents' sacral and heel skin, taken during routine visual skin checks, effectively cue nursing staff to start standard pressure injury prevention in eight nursing homes.
- Examine how resident characteristics such as age, sex, risk score, skin tone, race, ethnicity, body mass index and cognitive status relate to subepidermal moisture values, prevention initiation and pressure injury occurrence.
- Model prevention initiation from electronic health record data and subepidermal moisture values using mixed effects regression for clustered and repeated measures across a nine-month pragmatic stepped wedge trial.
- Explore through staff focus groups how device usability and nursing home and staff characteristics influence adoption of early detection and subsequent prevention practice.
More about the research
The catch is timing: by the time a nurse can see redness or purple discoloration, substantial damage has already occurred. Discoloration is also harder to see on darker skin tones, so residents from minority racial and ethnic groups are at a detection disadvantage, creating a health disparity. This project asks whether a bedside device that senses invisible early damage can prompt nurses to act in time.
Why it matters
Earlier detection of pressure damage, reportedly five to ten days before skin discoloration appears, could let nursing staff intervene while tissue is still salvageable, reducing painful and costly injuries among frail older residents. Because the reading does not depend on seeing color changes, it may also narrow a detection gap for residents with darker skin tones. Findings could inform redesigned nursing prevention routines and refined pressure injury prevention guidelines.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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