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 decreasing the high fall rate among inpatients.
In a qualitative study “Nurse’s Solutions to Prevent Inpatient Falls in Hospital Patient Rooms,” Huey-Ming Tzeng and Chang-Yi Yin’s purpose was to promote understanding of and to prevent inpatient falls. The research took place between February and April of 2007 in one acute, adult unit consisting of 32 beds in a Michigan medical center. The basis was on individual participation in a 45 to 60 minute long interview with nine current nursing staff and their opinions on five primary root causes of inpatient falls. Twenty-four potential solutions identified from the nurse’s interviews and the intervention strategies toward preventing patient falls were used to elicit and analyze data for useful and cost-effective fall-prevention strategies (Tzeng, & Yin, 2008).
Huey-Ming Tzeng and Chang-Yi Yin also did an exploratory study “Relatioinship between call light use and response time and inpatient falls in acute care settings,” to determine whether t...
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... and Yin have done different studies to find ways of reducing the high fall rate in health care facilities. The study on the call light response time didn’t seem to impact the patient fall rate; however, this was only one study in one health care facility. I believe that including nurses in fall prevention programs only makes sense. Falls will always be a risk in health care facilities but the input for preventing them should also come from the people who spend the most time with the patients. Nurse’s are the one’s who assess, diagnose, plan, implement, and evaluate their patients’ needs. Their knowledge and opinions are important.
Work Cited
Huey-Ming Tzeng, PhD, RN, Chang-Yi Yin, Nurses' Solutions to Prevent Inpatient Falls in Hospital Patient Rooms. Nurs Econ. 2008;26(3):179-187. View at:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/576954
Jones, D., & Whitaker, T. (2011). Preventing falls in older people: assessment and interventions. Nursing Standard, 25(52), 50-55.
Falls in nursing homes residents are associated with morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs. The centers for Medicare and Medicaid indicate falls as the quality indicator. (Leland, Gozalo, Teno, Mor, 2012). Factors such as new environment, medication, cognition, and non-compliance contribute to falls. A significant number of falls occur from wheelchairs. (Willy, 2013). Newly admitted residents to long-term care facilities are confused with the change. The new environment and the new unfamiliar faces increase the level of anxiety. Pain may also contribute to falls. In order to take tailor made preventative measures, fall risk factors for each resident should be evaluated periodically. Tools scoring risk factors can be utilized.
The National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) for falls in long term care facilities is to identify which patients are at risk for falling and to take action to prevent falls for these residents. (NPSG.09.02.01). There are five elements of performance for NPSG: 1. Assess the risk for falls, 2. Implement interventions to reduce falls based on the resident’s assessed risk, 3. Educate staff on the fall reduction program in time frames determined by the organization, 4. Educate the resident and, as needed, the family on any individualized fall reduction strategies, and 5. Evaluate the effectiveness of all fall reduction activities, including assessment,
Another research made 11 years after the prior research, shows that nearly 60% of all nurses and nursing assistants still suffer injuries in health care environment(“Nurses, assistants most injury prone in healthcare: CDC”, 2015). So what is the solution for this problem that affects more than 100,000 nurses and nursing assistants? Lifting patients is one of the main causes of injuries in the nursing homes. Over all injuries, 17% of them correspond to back injuries. But the use of lift machines itself doesn’t solve the problem. The prior research shows that 60.6% of the CNAs use lift machines, and those that don’t use it complain about the lack of time to do it. Therefore, the facility should decrease the ratio CNA to patient, in order to increase the time that the nursing assistants can spend on each resident. Also, a non-lift policy would prevent the CNAs from trying to lift patients in a quicker way that could potentially harm
This document’s purpose is to assist nurses to identify elderly patients at risk for falls and to implement interventions to prevent or decrease the number of falls and fall related injuries (RNAO, 2005). The target population are elderly adults in acute or long-term care. The recommendations are to help practitioners and patients make effective healthcare decisions, support nurses by giving educational recommendations, and to guide organizations in providing an environment receptive to quality nursing care and ongoing evaluation of guideline implementation and outcomes. These guidelines stress and interdisciplinary approach with ongoing communication and take patient preferences into consideration.
7). In an article by Rosalina Butao, RN, MSN, “Hitting Two Birds With One Bullet: Bedside Shift Reporting; “bedside reporting solidifies compliance to the Joint Commission’s 2009 National Patient Safety Goals: improve the accuracy of patient identification, improve communication among caregivers and encourage patient’s active involvement in their own care” all of which improves patient safety (Butao, 2010 p. S50). In a synthesis of literature by Sherman, et al., (2013), patient benefits include the patient being more knowledgeable and involved in their health care, improved the relationship between the nurse and patient, also improving patient satisfaction, as well as patient safety thus decreasing the number of falls, and increasing discharge times (p. 310). Bedside reporting allows the patient and family the opportunity to intervene during
The Quality and Education for Nurses (QSEN) project has set several goals for future nurses to meet in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitude (KSAs), one of which is safety (2014). The definition of safety according to QSEN is minimizing risk of harm to patients through system effectiveness and individual performance (QSEN, 2014). Since falls are such a huge occurrence in health care, preventing falls is critical for patient safety. The Joint Commission (2011) has also noted fall prevention as a National Safety Patient Goal (NPSG) 09.02.01 requiring hospitals to reduce the risk of harm resulting from falls.
A fall is a lethal event that results from an amalgamation of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors which predispose an elderly person to the incident (Naqvi et al 2009). The frequency of hospital admission due to falls for older people in Australia, Canada, UK and Northern Ireland range from 1.6 to 3.0 per 10 000 population (WHO 2012). The prevalence of senior citizen’s falls in acute care settings varies widely and the danger of falling rises with escalating age or frailty. Falls of hospitalized older adults are one of the major patient safety issues in terms of morbidity, mortality, and decreased socialization (Swartzell et al. 2013). Because the multi-etiological factors contribute to the incidence and severity of falls in older society, each cause should be addressed or alleviated to prevent patient’s injuries during their hospital stay (Titler et al. 2011). Therefore, nursing interventions play a pivotal role in preventing patient injury related to hospital falls (Johnson et al. 2011). Unfortunately, the danger of falling rises with age and enormously affect one third of older people with ravages varying from minimal injury to incapacities, which may lead to premature death (Johnson et al. 2011). In addition, to the detrimental impacts on patient falls consequently affect the patient’s family members, care providers, and the health organization emotionally as well as financially (Ang et al. 2011). Even though falls in hospital affect young as well as older patients, the aged groups are more likely to get injured than the youth (Boltz et al. 2013). Devastating problems, which resulted from the falls, can c...
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