FALL PREVENTION PRACTICES

Fall Prevention Practices



Fall Prevention Practices

Introduction

During United Stated Healthy Living's process to establish a provincial injury prevention strategy, unintentional fall related injury was identified as a prevention priority. Injury specific structures have been evolved to provide minutia and main heading for premier causes of injury. The intent of the United Stated Falls Prevention Strategy and Framework is to provide direction and opportunities for cooperation and collaboration regarding prevention and reduction of fall-related hospitalization and deaths in United Stated

Fall Prevention Practices at hospitals

Case Study

Inpatient falls and fall-related injuries extend to be a convoluted challenge that healthcare organisations face, extracting a heavy problem in terms of social, medical and financial outcomes. In Australian hospitals, falls make up the largest category (38%) of all described patient incidents.(1) Undoubtedly, falls are related to increased treatment costs and increased extent of patient stay. In the United States, it is forecast that the total number of falls resulting in wound will be 17,293,000 by the year 2020 at a projected cost of USD 85.37 billion per year.(2) In Singapore, published data is non-existent.

Although the international research community has spent a sizeable amount of effort and numerous publications on this issue, it is undisputed that falls among inpatients extend to present a threat to patient safety in hospital settings. The require to apply the present best clues to decrease falls is clear, yet actually there is no national guidance on fall avoidance programmes in Singapore, and clues is lacking from the literature on the effectiveness of fall avoidance interventions in hospitals.(3,4) Furthermore, there has been no national report or study on falls and fall avoidance at general hospitals in Singapore. In the midst of the plethora of literature on fall avoidance programmes in the community setting,(1,5,6) numerous guidelines have been developed.(7-9) However, research on fall avoidance programmes and the implementation of fall avoidance guidelines in the acute hospital setting is lacking. Only four published studies exist,(10-13) and all failed to show a significant decrease in the fall rate. Moreover, published work on the effectiveness of fall avoidance programmes is non-existent in Singapore. There is an imperative to ensure that the interventions are carefully tailored to support the natural environment and address the nurses' seen barriers to implementation of the fall avoidance programme.

Extensive research has directed to recommendations for multifaceted interventions to change existing practice.(14-18) Implementing change involves an active, well-planned stepwise process, encompassing a combination of interventions, tailoring strategies to the needs of the target audience and overwhelming barriers to behavioural change.(19-21) Two reports resolved that multifaceted intervention strategies are productive in prompting physicians to translate clues into practice when they encompass a combination of: (1) reminders, (2) education sessions, and (3) barrier-oriented interventions tailored to specific barriers. However, in a latest systematic reconsider, Grimshaw et al discovered that across all combinations of interventions, multifaceted interventions did not appear to be more productive than single interventions.(24) The results of the reconsider were not straightforward; strategies that were productive in one study were ineffective ...