Promotion of Patient Safety and Falls Prevention Introduction
Falls can be problematic for people of all ages, especially for the elderly. Falls are the second most common adverse event within the healthcare system (Quigley, 2006). Falls can result in serious injury and even death. Falls can be costly and most are preventable. Nearly one-third of older adults have experienced a fall, and about one in ten have resulted in a hospital stay due to injury (www.cdc.gov, n.d.). Older adults are more prone to falls and injury than other patients due to their age and accompanying illness (American Society of Registered Nurses …show more content…
The risk assessment will be multifunctional, will be able to be used across all units in the hospital, and will be able to be applied to all patients. All answers to the falls risk assessment will then be analyzed. Permission for this study will be obtained prior to commencement of data collection.
References
American Society of Registered Nurses. (2008, January 1). Elderly falls: The nurses preventative role. Journal of Nursing. Retrieved from http://www.asrn.org/journal-nursing/256-elderly-falls-the-nurses-preventative-role.html
Boye, N., Van Lieshout, E., Van Beeck, E., Hartholt, K., Van der Cammen, T., & Patka, P. (2012). The impact of falls in the elderly. Trauma, 15(1), 29-35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1460408612463145
Lovallo, C., Rolandi, S., Rossetti, A., & Lusignani, M. (2009, November 13). Accidental falls in hospital inpatients: evaluation of sensitivity and specificity of two risk assessment tools. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 690-696.
Miake-Lye, I., Hempel, S., Ganz, D., & Shekelle, P. (2013). Inpatient fall prevention programs as a patient safety strategy [Supplemental material]. Annals of Internal Medicine, 158(5),