Pressure injuries beyond acute care hospitals: a multicenter cohort study across rehabilitation settings.

All 15 centres belong to one Italian non-profit rehabilitation network, so the numbers may not hold for rehabilitation services organised differently, in Italy or elsewhere. The authors note that regional variation across Italy makes generalisation uncertain. Pressure injuries were assessed without standardised monitoring tools, which the authors say may have affected how reliably healing was judged. Nutritional status was not systematically recorded, so the study could not test whether malnutrition influenced who developed or healed a pressure injury. About 10% of patients were missing at least one of the factors used in the discharge analysis and were excluded from it. Healing was counted only while patients were still in the unit; once someone was discharged or died, the injury was no longer followed. When the analysis accounted for clustering by centre, two of the factors linked to delayed discharge, severe dependence on the Barthel Index and having a urinary catheter, were no longer statistically significant.

The work was funded by Ricerca Corrente funding from the Italian Ministry of Health. The authors declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. No other conflicts are described in the text supplied.

Do not read this as proof that pressure injuries cause the longer stays, or that healing them faster would get patients out sooner. This was a review of records with no intervention and no randomisation, and the patients who arrived with a pressure injury were also older and far more dependent, so their slower discharge may reflect their overall condition rather than the wound itself.