Despite many improvements in practice, pressure ulcers continue to be a source of concern to nurses and distress to patients.

Clearly, there are no simple solutions to this problem and it is necessary to improve our understanding of pressure ulcer epidemiology and the effectiveness of preventive methods to continue to progress.

Risk assessment is an important aspect of such work and forms the topic of this article.

The authors first consider some of the difficulties associated with risk assessment and suggest that progress requires the use of multivariate statistical methods. They then describe the difficulty of comparing existing studies, which gives rise to the need for further work. A description of the study currently being undertaken follows, together with a presentation of the preliminary findings and a discussion of their implications for practice.