The Importance Of Fall Prevention In Nursing Care

Fall prevention and management is integral to the care process. Managing the risk of falling requires identifying factors that contribute to falls. The goal of the following policy and procedures would be to encourage each resident’s independence by removing the risk of falls where possible and reducing both the incidence of falls and the injuries that may accompany falls.

Problem: Patient falls have long been a common and serious problem in hospitals across the nation, causing

Elimination of patient falls is not an easy task otherwise they would have been eliminated by now. Patient falls unfortunately continue to be a challenge and occur within the hospital and nursing home settings at alarming and sometimes deadly rates. The Center for Disease Control estimates that 1,800 older adults living in nursing homes die each year from fall-related injuries. Survivors frequently sustain injuries resulting in permanent disability and reduced quality of life. Annually, a typical nursing home with 100 beds reports 100 to 200 falls and many falls go unreported (CDC, 2015). Falls occur more often in nursing homes because patients are generally weaker, have more chronic illnesses, have difficulty ambulating, memory issues,

Falls are the second most common adverse event within health care institutions following medication errors, and an estimated 30% of hospital-based falls result in serious injury. The severity of this problem led the Joint Commission to make reducing the risk of patient injuries from falls a national patient safety goal for hospitals in 2009 (AHRQ, 2006). Falls are a leading cause of hospital-acquired injury and frequently prolong and complicate hospital stays and result in poor quality of life, increased costs, and unanticipated admissions to long-term care facilities.

Falls in an acute care setting lead the list of injury related deaths and deaths in the elderly. “A fall is defined as any event which patients are found on the floor (observed or unobserved) or an unplanned lowering of the patient to the floor by staff or visitors” (Kalisch, Tschannen, and Lee, 2012, p. 6). Medicare and Medicaid changes in 2008 list falls as one of the 10 hospital acquired conditions for which hospitals will no longer be reimbursed because falls are considered preventable conditions. Joint Commission accredited hospitals are required to assess for falls risk and implement falls prevention measures.

According to the Joint Commission Resources-JCR (2005), there is no universally accepted definition of a fall. Thus several definitions have been floated over time in an attempt to define the same. One such definition of a fall is "an untoward event that results in the patient or resident coming to rest unintentionally on the ground or another lower surface" (Joint Commission Resources, 2005). Falls are regarded common causes of injury at every age. However, it is important to note that for seniors, falls can have serious consequences. This is more so the case given that a fall can bring about pain, trauma, or even death. With that in mind, the primary purpose of this program remains the reduction of falls and hence the aversion of related injuries amongst the concerned patients. Of key importance remains the identification of patients who appear to be at high risk of falling. This way, appropriate strategies can be developed to reduce the injuries related to inpatient falls.

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

There are several different departments in our facility. You have kitchen, nursing, administration, dietary, laundry/housekeeping, therapy, activity, drivers, and maintenance. Each plays a role in keeping the residents safe from falling. The policy is followed by all staff members. It takes a team effort to help prevent falls from happening. Floors have to be free of obstacles, residents who are at high risk for falls need to have a floor mat present, if a resident is acting in an unsafe manner they are supervised on a 1:1.

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

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

Evaluation of the project outcome is critical in assessing whether the fall reduction programs are productive and of benefit to the participants or in other words, assessing the general value of the program (Miake-Lye et al., 2013). In this case, the rate of falls and potential resultant injuries and the overall adoption of fall prevention practices are critical components of quality improvement of the program. They are crucial parameters for evaluating the success of the implementation project as well as learning from the successes and the challenges herein. In the case of this project, it is anticipated that there will be a decrease in the rate of falls among the patients. It is also expected that the number and severity of injuries due to

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.

Every unit that I had clinical rotations on, take fall prevention very seriously. I agree with you when you said that falls should be prevented, rather then have to put precautions after something already occurred.Therefore, it's important for us to learn different ways to avoid this problem. In addition to all the interventions mentioned on your post, I would add a little encouragement to this patient population, to initiate the recommended interventions. I see a lot of patients that are capable of initiating this recommended interventions, but for some reason are discouraged, or have lack of support.

Thank you for your great post. I am also working on the fall prevention and reduction but in acute hospital setting. The references you share may also benefit me. Falls affect everyone and can occur in everywhere. However, people in health care facilities are already fragile and falls can lead to more injury and extend the stay in facilities. The is a good topic to create a better change for the organization and patient care.

When it comes to falls in the nursing, there are a lots causes but remember most of the people of who live in nursing are older and they also tend to have thought or memory problems, to have difficulty with activities of daily living, Due memory problem, most of time they do have tendency of transferring self either from w/c to bed or from bed to w/c. and most of time they are not successfully during self-transfer. Also there is a lot of falls incidence during transfer were staff are