Twice-daily skin moisturising to reduce the incidence of skin tears in an acute hospital setting.

Objective: To examine the effectiveness of twice-daily moisturiser application to the lower and upper limbs of those patients aged 70 years and older admitted to an acute care setting on reducing the incidence of skin tear injuries. Design: We allocated people into two different groups with different treatments and monitored and compared how often a skin tear occurred. Setting: One ward was assigned as the location were patients admitted were given the moisturiser treatment and another ward where people were patients received the usual treatment. This study was set top in a large hospital in regional Victoria, Australia. Participants: Patients admitted to the two wards who were 70 years of age or over, who had no allergy to nuts were invited to participate. Almost 70% of people invited to be a part of the study gave their consent to take part. Interventions: Patients on the ward where the treatment was to have the moisturiser applied, received it twice-daily to the arms and legs. Main Outcome Measure(s): To see if the moisturiser had worked on reducing the number of times that someone received a skin tear when compared across the two different wards over a period of the three-month trial. We then compared the number of skin tears with the figures that have been kept from previous years for the institution to see if there was a reduction. Main Results: Even though we did see a decrease in the number of skin tears over the study period for the whole hospital, we could not say that the reduction was because of the moisturiser. This is because when we compared both wards there was no significant difference in the number of skin tears between the two wards. Conclusions: Despite other research suggesting that twice-daily moisturiser reduces the incidence of skin-tears, our results do not support this. Despite this, the data would suggest an – at times- reduction in the number of skin-tear incidence across the hospital that we postulate as being associated with changes in clinical staff behaviour around skin-tears on the basis that they knew a study was being conducted.