The New York Times has an article about bed sores and team approach to preventing them.

Some highlights:

New research is suggesting that the battle against bedsores requires a team approach, enlisting everyone from nurses and nursing assistants to laundry workers, nutritionists, maintenance workers and even in-house beauticians.
[...]
“Preventing pressure ulcers is a 24/7/365 kind of job,” said Jeff West, a clinical reviewer at Qualis Health in Seattle, who helped to set up the collaborative in 2003. “It’s not as if one person can get it all done. And if it fails just a little bit, just during the weekends, for instance, you’re not going to get the results. It takes tremendous consistency.”
[...]
At the Lutheran Home in Fort Wayne, Ind., for instance, “the laundry workers helped us see that some clothes weren’t fitting the residents properly and were restricting their skin,” said Jeanie Langschied, a registered nurse there.

The kitchen staff began putting protein powders in cookies to boost nutrition. They added buffet dining, so residents would not remain in one position for so long, compressing fragile skin.

Even the beauty shop “realized that wait times needed to decrease,” Ms. Langschied said, and residents should be repositioned while getting their hair done. “It was all departments looking at everything, and it was just amazing the information that flowed through.”
[...]
At David Place, a nursing home in David City, Neb., staff members say they focused on assessing each resident’s risk for bedsores, and noted this risk on the assignment sheets used by nursing assistants.

“The residents at highest risk,” said Dan Smith, director of nursing, “would be the last up for meals and the first down after meals so they would not be in their wheelchairs for long periods of time putting pressure on their bottoms.” Residents at risk from weight loss were given yellow plates, so that staff members would remember to encourage them to eat more.

David Place also bought new mattresses made of high-density foam to reduce pressure in key areas. Staff members say they redoubled efforts to keep feet elevated with pillows so that bedsores would not develop on the heels. And they began to use new moisture barrier creams with residents who were incontinent, since lingering moisture can speed the development of sores.
[...]
Staff members at Palatka Health Care Center in Palatka, Fla., initiated a similar blend of measures. They created a “skin-watch action team,” or SWAT, to identify vulnerable residents and to make sure that their heels were floated, that they were given pressure-reducing cushions and that they were repositioned frequently, said Carol Jones, a risk manager at the center.

“We got the grass-roots level, the certified nursing assistants, much more involved, and they were held accountable,” Ms. Jones said. If a bedsore began to develop, she said, “we’d ask them, how did this happen?”

Excellent article and worth printing and sharing with everyone who works at nursing homes…and everyone includes those who we might think are vital members of a skin care team.