Effects Of Fall Prevention

Fall Prevention in Older Adult Patients A fall in the clinical setting is a multi-million-dollar preventable problem. A fall can lead to serious consequences to the patients, family, and the healthcare institution. A fall is an event which results in a person coming to rest inadvertently on the ground or floor or other lower level (WHO, 2012). I am a nurse that worked for one year and still considered myself as a novice nurse that is growing in my career. I have experienced falls in the hospital and nursing care level. The population in my hospital is in South Florida that are usually retired older adults. When working at night I experience this population having memory loss that is termed sun-downing. These patients tend to be unaware of …show more content…
As well as there are more research studies that have used hospitals than in other healthcare institutions. The information will be present to administrators by educating the effort of having a fall prevention program that goes beyond charting and how the decrease cost of falls can their budget. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the average cost of a fall injury is $35,000 and Medicare pays for about 78% of the cost of falls. In addition, these costs do not take into account the long-term effects of the fall injuries that the community has to face such as disability, dependence on others, lost time from work, and reduced quality of life (2013). If the program is successful, the can be able to admit and discharge more patients faster due to the increase productivity of safety management.
After the approval of the proposal, a committee will manage on fall prevention program which will offer a hospital wide education on what changes will be happening. Nurses will play a major on whether the fall prevention program will be effective. The nurses spend the most time with the patient within the hospital stay. The support from not just the nurse, but other health care occupations will be significant in how committed the staff is behind the …show more content…
The staff then will be mandated to complete a computer based learning (CBL) on the risk factors of falls and how certain types of diseases can cause a patient more prone to diseases. Each department clinical educator will make sure the employees have completed the CBL. The next step will an in-service on how the computer charting will be changing from the universal approach like the Morse Fall Scale to more individualized assessment tool that pulls information from the patients’ comorbidities and activities of daily living that creates a flag on whether the patient is a candidate of being on fall precautions. This will start from the emergency room admission until the patient is on the medical floor that can then be altered until discharge if sudden changes occur within the hospital stay. In the study mentioned before, evidence based practice has shown that having an individualized approach is more effective than a universal one. Once a patient is considered a candidate for fall precautions these measures are put in place for prevention. The measures were the bed alarm on, non-skid socks, call light within reach, and bed is in low locked position. The addition to the measures is adding an education session of the fall prevention committee. The aim of the educational session was to increase the patients’ awareness of their specific risk of falling during hospitalization and to