Bottom line:  Practice guidelines recommend having a standard procedure for assessing and documenting skin and training staff who will be making these assessments, but there is no specific recommendation for the number of staff required for assessing skin.

DynaMed topic on Pressure Ulcers includes a section on prevention screening and section on guidelines.  Prevention/screening section summarizes data on utility of specific structured assessment tools.  There are numerous guidelines, which should document studies on which they base recommendations.  One guideline is Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI) guideline on pressure ulcer treatment.

JBI+COnNECT – There are several evidence summaries, but the most relevant ones (ex: Pressure Ulcers: Prevention and Management, seem to  reference the guidelines included in DynaMed, such as that of the Royal College of Nursing.

No identifed recommendations or mention of using more than one person to assess a patient’s skin in the DynaMed or JBI+ information.

PubMed search:  pressure ulcers AND (rater* OR observer*) AND (accura* OR reliabl*)

Yielded studies such as these two that compare use of one nurse to two nurses in documenting skin and found no difference in the number of pressure ulcers documented.  These studies did not address assessment for risk.

Kottner J, Tannen A, Dassen T. Hospital pressure ulcer prevalence rates and number of raters. J Clin Nurs. 2009 Jun;18(11):1550-6.

Kottner J, Tannen A, Halfens R, Dassen T. Does the number of raters influence the pressure ulcer prevalence rate? Appl Nurs Res. 2009 Feb;22(1):68-72.