The National Health Service (NHS) has been under pressure for years, with this rising further during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2022-2023 nurses protested against the pressures they were experiencing and how this endangered patient safety in the largest nursing strikes in NHS history. In my study I focus on one particular aspect of patient safety; pressure ulcers. Pressure ulcers are injuries caused by continuous pressure on skin. In an ethnography of an NHS hospital and the medical device industry, I trace how the pressure on patients’ skin is connected to the pressure on the NHS. I find that wherever pressure builds up there are attempts to move it to other sites, people, things, and times. I show different ways that mess can result from this dynamic and different attempts to control it. The first paper demonstrates how nurses try to clean up messy ambiguities in the policy shift away from a ‘culture of blame’ to a ‘culture of learning’ in the NHS by advocating for different responsibilities, values, and interests in different contexts. The second paper unpacks how a multidisciplinary team investigating serious pressure ulcers in the hospital uses retrospective speculation and anticipation to control uncertainty in prevention. The third paper counters the technological solutionist promise that technologies relieve pressure on skin and staff by showing how pressure is not removed but moved and the politics of this redistribution. Drawing these three papers together, I conceptualise pressure ulcer care in the NHS as a ‘choreography’ to emphasise interdependencies between a variety of human and other-than-human actors, their routines and adaptations to specific situations, and the constant work that goes into organising and planning these practices. I reflect on the limitations of the pressure metaphor that links pressure ulcer prevention with contemporary debates about the state of the NHS.