Fall Risk Assessment

People go to the hospital for help; they go to the hospital to receive treatment for their condition. What people do not go to the hospital for is to acquire further ailments to their health. This is why patient safety is a topic of concern when focusing on care nurses provide for patients. According to Potter and Perry (2013), “Safety is often defined as freedom from physiological and physical injury” (p. 365). There are many aspects of safety that prevent physiological and physical injury, but a topic of major concern is fall prevention. Falls are a major concern because every year, there are approximately 700,000 to 1 million falls reported in the health care setting (AHRQ, 2013). This statistic is of substantial interest due to the high

Morse Fall Risk Assessment is the best way to prevent falls because of its accurate ability to determine what patients are at high risk (Baek, Pieo, Jin & Lee, 2014). If used consistently and correctly, it has the ability to pin point which patients should be on “high alert” for falls, allowing the nurse to keep a watchful eye on those patients. Things that effect More Fall scores are having a secondary diagnosis, history of falls, having an IV, having an ambulatory aid or not, and assessing gait, and mental status (Baek, et al., 2014). The Morse Fall score is a standardized tool that helps narrow down what patients have certain risk factors that increase the likelihood of falls. Nurses need to take this tool seriously and make certain to score their patients to the best of their knowledge. This assessment tool will help prevent falls and the injury they could cause by alerting nurses of the patients that need more attention and implementation related to fall

Reading Hospital in Pennsylvania decided to take further action about the issue of patient falls because of the lack of success other programs had given them in the past. Their Advanced Practice Care Coordinator along with their management team was able to foster a plan based on various research to lessen the fall rate in their hospital—which eventually proved to be successful. Their first point was to educate their staff about the risks factors leading to patient falls in addition to reminding the staff to look out for those risks. They did this by making sure it was reinforced everywhere the staff went that preventing falls was their #1 goal at the time. They had various meetings and posters about the risk factors for falls along with a bright yellow sign stating the number of day that had went by without a patients falling. These things served as education tools and reminders for the staff. In addition to staff education, they also focused on the patient environment to prevent falls. They recognized that nurses were spending a majority of their time charting at the nurses station—this make the patients out of the nurses site and prevented the nurses from easily hearing them call for help. Their solution to this problem was putting portable computers outside of the rooms in order to be able to chart while monitoring the patients. After implementing nurse education and