Pressure ulcers (PU) have long been recognised as a challenge to healthcare, are a cause of significant pain and distress for patients and are costly for healthcare providers in term of finances and use of human resource (Guest et al, 2020).

​This paper, the first in a series of three, describes the predominant methods that have been used to capture the prevalence of PUs in England over the last 20 years. The second paper will describe the proposed system for national PU measurement in England and the third paper will outline proposals for implementing this system to drive quality improvement.