Falls in Behavioral Health: Different Population, Different Risk Factors
“I need help in 230A! Mr. Johnson is on the floor!”
Does your heart still sink when you hear a patient has fallen? We’ve gotten better at preventing falls, but we haven’t eliminated them. They remain one of the most common “incident” reports in hospitals. And did you know that adult behavioral health inpatients have more falls and fall-related injuries than patients on medical-surgical units?
In this month’s Cultivating Quality article, “Preventing Falls Among Behavioral Health Patients,” free until July 20, Stephanie Ocker and colleagues discuss their very successful falls-related interventions on an inpatient behavioral health unit. As they proceeded with their root cause analyses of recent falls, an unusual risk factor stood out:
“Patients frequently walked in the unit’s common area with bath blankets hanging around them and often trailing under their feet. When nurses would ask patients not to walk around with blankets to reduce the risk of tripping, patients would say they were cold.”