Essay on Fall Prevention Programs in Acute Care Hospitals

During hospitalizations, falls are amongst the highest preventable consistent adverse events. Preventing such undesirable events, enhances patient overall experience, as well as increased trust in the health care professional team (Fragata, 2011). The importance of fall prevention lies with the many serious unfavorable health outcomes it can pose on the patient. Falls have the potential increase length of hospital stay, limit mobility, independence, but can ultimately lead to health deterioration, including death. Worldwide, falls are the second leading cause of accidental death. In addition to the life-threatening health and safety risks falls have to the patient, it also as a financial impact,

Patient falls in hospitals are a critical problem and are used as a standard metric of nursing care quality. According to the Joint Commission, thousands of patients fall in hospitals each year. Approximately 30-50% of falls result in injuries and prolonged hospital stays. Any patient in a hospital is at risk for falling and certain measures should be in place to prevent this. Preventing falls and injuries are not only important for the patient, but also for their families, the hospital, health care team, and insurance companies. It is estimated the average cost of a hospital admission due to a fall is $20,000 and by 2030, an estimated $54 billion will be spent on health care costs due to falls. The purpose of this paper is to explore the risk factors of falls in hospitals and interventions used to combat this problem.

Falls are a big concern for all employees in a hospital setting daily. The worst thing that can happen to a patient while being hospitalized is a fall, or a major fall, that could result in skin damage (i.e. wounds, skin tears, or abrasions), a fracture or break, thus limiting their independence. This student’s goal was to develop a way to educate staff members in ways they can help reduce the number of falls that occur. Developing a sample Fall Risk Prevention Policy as well as a Staff in-service on fall risk and Prevention achieved this goal.

Capan, K., & Lynch, B. (2007). Reports from the field: patient safety. a hospital fall assessment and intervention project. Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management: JCOM, 14(3), 155-160.

Patients are medicated, in an unknown environment, attached to lines, drains, and physiologically impaired in some manner. They are at a very high risk for falling. The American Hospital Association explains how participating hospitals have reduced falls by 27% by using the bundles and toolkits from Hospital Engagement Network (AHA HEN), this process requires the interdisciplinary team involvement. Each has their own role, nursing plays a critical role in fall prevention, they are with the patient for 12hours in a hospital setting and have direct care with assessing, creating a care plan, implementation of interventions, and evaluation. They can report any concerns or data to the

Nurses help to ensure patient safety, which includes preventing falls and fall-related injuries (Quigley, Neily, Watson, Wright, & Strobel, 2017). The general population is at risk for falls and fall-related injuries, more specifically the elderly, 65 and over (Quigley, Neily, Watson, Wright, & Strobel, 2017). Patient falls are one of the top events for hospitals and long-term care facilities due to loss of physical function or cognition (Quigley, Neily, Watson, Wright, & Strobel, 2017). Fall-related injuries are a serious health issue for the elderly population (Quigley, Neily, Watson, Wright, & Strobel, 2017). Nurses make a major contribution to patient safety by assessing fall risk and designing patient-specific fall prevention

Each year, one out of three elderly people fall (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2015). The CDC (2015) also reports that once an individual has fallen, the chance that they will fall again doubles. Falls also contribute to an increase in direct medical costs. The CDC (2015) states, “Direct medical costs for fall injuries are thirty-four billion dollars annually. Hospital costs account for two-thirds of the total.” The amount of elderly people who fall each year along with the economic costs that result from falls indicates that preventing patient falls remains an important goal for healthcare workers including nurses. Nurses can use the nursing process—assessment, diagnosis, planning, intervention, and evaluation—to prevent patient falls and meet the fall prevention standards set by various regulating bodies.

Increased falls on a particular unit became a concern. The unit formed a fall prevention committee. This committee used evidence-based practice to create a plan and interventions to help reduce falls. The fall prevention committee then monitored trends in the fall prevention process, fall rates, medications, surgeries and disease comorbidities that were associated with fall. Implementing these techniques had a significate reduction of patient falls.

I went to Tampa General Hospital Fall Repiratory Care Conference that was held October 27, 2015 at USF CAMLS building downtown Tampa. I chose to try and attend two events in case I could not make one. Working in patient care means that sometimes you won't get out on time to make your arrangement.

Falls are considered a leading cause of mortality and injury among older adults and majority of the falls occurs while hospitalized. One would think being in the hospital would be one of the safest places for older adults as far as fall prevention is concern due to the fact that hospitals provide staffing around the clock for patients but more and more falls have been occurring in the hospital especially in the older adult population. Fall is an unintended descent to the ground. It raises public and family care liability; it also decreases patient’s functioning because it causes pain and suffering, and increases medical costs (Saverino et al, 2015). The Center for Disease Control

Prior to implementation previous data from the Quality Assurance Committee on falls frequency and falls history for past year will be analyzed for the participants. Each participant will be de-identified for confidentiality purpose and in compliant with IRB to protect the individual. During this multi-pronged approach, the project implementation will include weekly training of all shifts through formal and informal method, weekly tracking record of fall occurrences, the implementation of BRIGGS Healthcare fall risk assessment, and weekly interdisciplinary team meeting using the BRIGGS Interdisciplinary Post Fall Assessment for

Thank you both for reading my post. In all the three hospitals I’ve worked, a fall prevention program has always been in place. And I must say, just as you have cited, the implementation of the protocol has become a routine, that almost always all patients were labeled as fall risks. Just like alarm fatigue, where nurses and other care providers become oblivious of the sound of the alarm, so it happens that the fall protocol were documented either on paper or electronically, but the actual monitoring of patients were lacking. As a patient safety analyst, I am privy to fall events, and the report would indicate that patients were place on fall prevention protocol. As I cited earlier, completing the Morse Fall Risk Assessment does not do

Environmental changes are another evidence-based strategy that can also assist in the reduction of inpatient falls. The lowering of bed rails, limiting the use of restraints and providing floor mats can be used in preventing patient falls. Bed rails should only be used as targeted strategies in situations where they are effective in minimizing the risk of inpatient falls and only be used on patients who are not active enough to be able to climb over bedrails (Wood et al., 2010).

Swee Geok Lim, (2016) also stated that patient falls have been recognized as one of the main issues in today’s health care in spite of efforts taken in preventing such incidents from happening. Patient falls can be prevented by means of fall risk assessment tools. The risk assessment tools are used to assess patients who are at risk for fall by identifying the fall prevention resources of the patients. It was recommended to implement a patient fall prevention program with the target of 10% reduction or more of patient falls each year. Morse Fall Scale is an example of risk assessment

Patients’ safety is a priority in today’s health care system. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that hospitals will no longer be reimbursed for certain nosocomial conditions, thus placing a great demand on healthcare systems to prevent hospital-acquired health related injuries such as falls (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2008). Nosocomial conditions, such as falls are conditions that are preventable that occur in the clinical or hospital setting. A fall is an unexpected event in which the participant comes to rest on the ground, floor, or lower level (Amador & Loera, 2006). Fall related accidents, injuries and death remain a major problem among hospitalized patients. It is estimated that one out of three adult patients over the age of 65 will fall (CDC, 2014). Falls have detrimental effects and impact on patients’ health and outcome as well as hospitalizations costs. Falls have attributed to broken bones, fractured hips, fear of walking alone, brain trauma, and even death. In 2012, the direct medical costs of older adult falls were $30 billion (CDC, 2014). According to Tzeng, Yin, & Grunawalt (2008), even the length of stay is affected, with inpatient falls with injury resulting in a 7.5-day increase in total length of stay. The attributed cost of falls, increased in injuries and prolonged hospital stay have a great impact on Advanced Practice Nurses’ (APNs) practice. The focus of this paper is to discuss evidenced-based