If We Know How to Prevent Falls, Why Are Our Patients Still Falling?
Falls: at least ‘theoretically preventable.’
Sometimes it can feel as though managing fall risk takes up a big part of the day. You do your regular risk assessments, put safety measures into place, and still—patients fall.
Considering the frailty of some patients, the many meds that contribute to falls, and the fact that even mild cognitive impairment can be made worse by a hospitalization, it’s a tribute to good nursing care that there aren’t more falls.
But because falls sometimes cause serious injury and are, at least theoretically, preventable, it always feels like we’ve failed when a patient ends up on the floor.
A checklist for high-risk patients.
Nurses at one hospital decided that they needed a new way to approach fall safety. In “Using a Fall Prevention Checklist to Reduce Hospital Falls,” authors Madeline Johnston and Morris Magnan describe their use of a 14-item change-of-shift checklist based on the hospital’s existing fall prevention protocol. For a patient known to be at high risk for falls, oncoming staff went through the checklist to be sure that all prevention interventions were in place before taking responsibility for the patient. […]
