Fall Prevention Program Summary

Creating a comprehensive fall prevention program is within every hospital's reach when practical strategies and teamwork are used to provide a safe environment for care delivery. Successful fall prevention programs have measurable attributes, which include:
• Research-based risk factors that are applied at the point of care

• Consistent attention to environmental hazards for all patients
• Nursing and medical interventions aligned with reduction of fall risk factors for
individual patients

• Continuous learning about unit-specific fall occurrences derived from good fall data
• Effective communication of patient risk and teamwork among caregivers and across units — no matter where the patient is in the hospital.
Lets all work together to prevent patient falls in our hospitals and keep our patients safe during hospital visit.

Fall Presentation General Facts

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Fall contributing factors

Preventing patient falls and its related injuries in acute care settings has been an elusive goal for many hospitals. As we already know that falls are high-risk and high-cost problems for many healthcare facilities, and there are several factors that contributed to the complexity of sustaining true fall reduction and the avoidance of harm and injuries. For example, an aging population, rising patient acuity, nurse shortages, and an inefficient work environment for caregivers can make the process improvement a challenge. Leadership plays an instrumental role in understanding the problem, establishing a safety climate culture, and improving the work environment of caregivers so that much needed direct nursing time for patient care can be increased. What factors do your hospital face to prevent falls?

Hitcho, E. B., Krauss, M. J., Birge, S., et.al. (2004). Characteristics and circumstances of falls in a hospital setting: A prospective analysis. Journal of Geriatric Internal Medicine, 19(7), 732-739.

Quiz Feedback

How did you do on the fall quiz with captain safety? Are there other questions that captain safety missed? Please feel free to comments on the quiz presentation

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Research on Falls

Falls in the hospital affect young as well as older patients, are often unassisted, and involve elimination-related activities. Further studies are necessary to prevent hospital falls and reduce fall injury rates. The majority of inpatient fall studies is retrospective and relies solely on data from medical records or incident reports. Information from risk management databases is often incomplete and may not identify potential causal factors for falls. Most studies often focused only on fall risk factors and did not examine contributing factors or circumstances of the falls (e.g., what triggered the fall).

Salgado, R., Lord, S. R., Packer, J., & Ehrlich, F. (1994). Factors associated with falling in elderly hospital patients. Gerontology. 40(2), 325–334

PowerPoint Fall Prevention

Fall Prevention Presentation1

Fall Prevention PowerPoint Presentation

http://www.scribd.com/full/53173741?access_key=key-2gv1joc3r6w9tdi7iou9

What fall prevention tools is the most effective?

Everyday nurses in different hospitals have many patient falls and they do not have a fall risk tool that works or the fall risk tool that are currently using does not work. I wonder what fall risk tools are you utilizing to prevent falls in your facility?
The Morse Fall Scale (MFS) is a rapid and simple method of assessing a patient's likelihood of falling. The MFS is used widely in acute care settings.

Fall Prevention Video

SFall assessment must be performed upon admission to identify risk factors such as:

SCognitive dysfunction

SDementia

SImpaired Mobility

SMedications

SEnvironmental

Fall Prevention in Acute Health Care Settings

The topic of fall prevention has been very personal to me as a nurse. As we all know that people go to the hospital to get help but at times they fell and get injured and suffer the consequences even die from the complications. I decided to discuss and share how falls can be prevented in acute settings like hospitals and rehabilitation facilities. Many falls happen when people are sick and admitted in hospitals due to change of environments, side effects to medication and other physiological stress that cause confusion. The falls that are reported from the hospitals are one of the leading cause of premature death for people older than 65 years old. It may sounds simple when we talk about fall prevention, but preventing these falls is a challenge for nursing staff. Many strategies has been implemented in different hospitals but everyday more than one to two patients happen to be a victims of falls. Guiding and educating all health care professionals and nursing students in fall prevention programs is the best defeat to prevent and reduce falls in acute health care settings. Rush, Williams, Patton, Chamberlin, Bendyk & Sparks (2009) reported that research has shown that nurse and other health care professionals lack the awareness of fall rates, significant risk factors and fall reduction interventions. If fall preventions saves lives, what should nurse educators implement in the their teaching curriculum about fall prevention? Is it important to teach this topic in nursing schools?

Reference:
Rush, K.L., Robey-Williams, C., Patton, L.M., Chamberlain, D., Bendyk, H., & Sparks, T. (2009). Patients falls: acute care nurses' experiences. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 18(3), 357-365.