Best Prevention Of Falls Prevention

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,

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.

The recommended implementation of the fall prevention program in an organization includes admitting older patients at risk for falls. Such a program requires time, money, collaboration effort from the staff, and administrative support. Fall risk is a growing patient issue in the unit therefore the proposal solution is needed to prevent fall. It is a comprehensive approach to improve the health condition of the elderly in the unit.

A fall is defined as an unanticipated occurrence where a person happens to lie on the ground, floor or a surface that is below them from their prior standing, lying or sitting position. In the United States, people over the age of 65 years of age is increasing at a rapid rate due to the increase in the average life expectancy and our baby boomers advancing in years. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that the quantity of people aged 65 years or older will double by the year 2030 and the people 85 years and older will grow by 5 times by the year 2050. With the increasing average age of Americans, the escalation of falls in the elderly will increase tremendously because of many different risk factors that affect our elderly population. (Michael et al., 2010).

If patient safety is the most important issue in Health Care facilities then how come hospital inpatient falls continue to be the most reported of all accidental falls (Tzeng & Yin, 2009)? Throughout the years, hospitals continue to make changes to decrease the risk of accidents and increase the quality of patient safety. With research studies and improvements made, patient falls still hold the largest portion of reported incidents in hospitals (Tzeng, & Yin, 2008). According to Tzeng & Yin (2008), “fall prevention programs apparently do not effectively reduce inpatient fall rates because of human factors and ergonomics in a hospital environment (p.179, para. 2). The two studies reviewed in this paper were performed with the hopes of

Fall prevention is a primordial safety concern in hospitals. There can be multiple bad outcomes from a simple fall. The fall of a patient can result in immediate death. This is to say that a patient could fall and die on impact. Weak and confused, a patient may fall on the floor without a way to lessen the impact from the fall. This patient may fracture his or her skull. Fractured femur or hip bones can result from falls in the elderly because of their weaker bones. This would extend the length of the hospital stay for the patient. This would be terrible considering that many of these falls are preventable. The patient can become permanently disabled form a fall while hospitalized. The measures against falls are many because they can be caused

This article is a review of various studies done to test interventions to reduce the occurrence of falls in the elderly. Prevention of falls is the goal to reduce the increasing amount of fractures in adults over the age of 50. Risk factors for falls include age, being female, cognitive impairments, medical factors such as diagnosis, use of certain medications, environmental factors, and other physical impairments. These studies use fall prevention strategies to test effectiveness at reducing falls.

The in-patient hospital setting has an estimated 700,000-1,000,000 falls annually, with one third of these falls being preventable (Bock, 2017). There are also repercussions from the falls such reimbursement costs for treatment of falls, which can range from $7,000-$30,000 and the cost of legal claims (Bock, 2017). The use of sitters as a fall prevention intervention has received various reviews on the actual efficiency and rate of success (Bock, 2017). However, the annual cost of sitters has been reported to be $1,000,000 (Bock, 2017). Although the welfare of the patient is the number one priority of the facility, there should be more options for the staff in order to prevent the astronomical cost of delegating sitters. Currently, there is no best practice for implementation of fall prevention interventions (Bock,

This article utilized some programs that are similar the field experience site. Therefore, one can use this article as a reference to modify and adjust the current fall prevent protocol to make an effective change to reduce falls in the hospital. Furthermore, the article also recommends education related to fall prevention that can be useful content in the transition program.

achieve this goal is urgent. Therefore, the unit Manager, the Environmental Manager and staff members will have a meeting in 2 days. The details about the plan of action will be discussed, role play, and the watching of a short video. Copies of the revised fall prevention policy and protocols will be distributed; patients and family will be aware of implementations that are in place to prevent obliterating falls.

Patient safety is a priority of facilities as well as governmental agencies. Regulatory agencies require data about falls because they have been prioritized as a high-risk problems resulting in fractures, surgeries, disabilities, and even death. Preventing falls is very important, especially if patient safety is a documented as a priority for an organization. According to Dlugacz (2006), regulatory agencies require hospitals and health care organizations to correlate human resource indicators, such as staffing ratios with quality indicators, such as falls. It is believed that lack of appropriate staff plays a part in the number of falls that patients have. However, it was in conclusive that there was a correlation between the number of staff and patient falls. One indicator, such as staffing should not be used as the only determining factor for patient falls because there could be a number of factors such as the patient’s age, illness, level of consciousness, mental state, and environmental factors.

As a hospital administrator I will do everything in my power to try to avoid falls and overall patient safety. Unfortunately falls will happen but there are methods that can be implemented to prevent falls. The necessity to decrease them is very imperative. Preventing falls needs the vigorous commitment of numerous people. To move towards the right direction, good prevention involves administrative values and effective practices that encourage cooperation and communication, in addition to specific knowledge.

There’s an increased rate at which patients fall in hospital settings are affecting the healthcare industries, patients and family members. According to studies performed, it is evident that those who are mainly affected are the adults that are over 60 years of age. Some of the factors that lead to these falls are; visual impairments, wrong footwear and tripping are some of the external causes of falls among these hospitalized patients. Because this has become a major concern, research has embarked on how these factors have led to increased falls in these patients. Adult patients falls are major threat to patients safety and cost management in hospitals making prevention measures a key area of concern and

Falls can have an overwhelming effect on legal, economical, ethical, and political situations. Many questions arise as to how to keep patients safe when they are at risk for falls. “A fall is described as a sudden, unintentional, downward movement of the body to the ground or other surface; when a patient falls, he or she is at risk of serious injury, disability, and possibly death” Huey-Ming, 2012). Falls happen during the day, afternoon, at night and do not subside do to the amount of staff. Falls happen when patients are ambulating, transferring, getting up without assistance, reaching for personal items, along with many different reasons. It is our job and duty as health care professionals to ensure patients remain safe during their hospital stay. As we learned in my previous literature review, patients that have had previous falls tend to fall more than those who do not, falls will increase the patients stay when there is or isn’t an injury obtained.

Fall are largely preventable are more common in the elderly. They are as a result of two or more factors more commonly environmental. How we respond to risk factors to falls shape the outcome of our encounter or those of other with the fall risk. In this paper, the author discuss the consequences of addressing or failure to address a fall risk and the effect that this has on the individual, risk for litigation and the organization at large.