Quality Improvement Project Presentation

Problem Statement

Health organizations have a critical role to play in the promotion of the health, wellbeing, and recovery of their patients. They are required to create environments that not only promote healing but also increase the ability of the healthcare providers to offer high-quality care. Health organizations also have to minimize the occurrence of adverse events in their environments. This includes reducing the rates of falls among their patients. Often, patient falls occur during patient transfers, visiting toilets, and having disoriented patients in the unit.

Patient falls have significant adverse health outcomes. They predispose the patients to injuries, increased healthcare needs, extended hospital stays, and high costs incurred in health spending. It also results in job dissatisfaction among the healthcare providers due to poor health outcomes (Anderson, Postler & Dam, 2016). Therefore, the issue should be addressed for the promotion of the health and wellbeing of the patients.

Health organizations have the responsibilities of ensuring that measures as well as policies are adopted to address the issue of patient falls. They have to prioritize the implementation of interventions that will minimize the risk of adverse outcomes in their settings. An example would be training the healthcare providers on risk assessment and management of unforeseen safety issues in the organization.

Several interventions have been explored in studies to determine their efficacy in preventing patient falls. One of them is the use of call lights where system alerts are used to notify the staffs about the patients at risk of falls. The other intervention is the use of lower bed or bed rails to prevent patient falls. Organizations have also increased their focus on improving their existing risk assessment processes for patient falls.

However, most of these interventions have been unsuccessful. This is attributed to a number of factors such as inconsistencies in use in the clinical setting, high workload, lack of sustainable strategies, and low level of awareness among the healthcare providers on their use (Anderson et al., 2016). The use of individual falls assessment and prevention approaches have been shown to be ineffective and not sustainable in addressing the issue of patient falls.

However, the utilization of simultaneous falls prevention strategies can be effective in creating the desired safety culture in a hospital. This includes the use of system alerts, hourly nursing rounds, and improving staff communications to address the issue. Despite the existence of the different methods of preventing patient falls, there has been limited use of them in our hospital, hence, the need for the exploration of effectiveness of simultaneous falls prevention approach in addressing the issue of patient falls.

Literature Review

Patient falls is a prevalent safety problem facing many hospitals globally. It is estimated that the risk of patient falls increases with age. For example, the elderly people living in nursing homes and admitted in the hospitals are highly likely to fall more than those in the community. It is also estimated that between 3- and 50% of the elderly people in long-term care institutions experience falls on a yearly basis.

Irrespective of the age, the risk of any hospitalized patient falling in the hospital setting is about 3-20%. This makes patient falls contribute to about 70% of all the accidents reported in the inpatient settings.

Factors Contributing to Patient Falls

The factors that contribute to the high rate of patient falls in the clinical setting are varied. One of them is intrinsic factors. Intrinsic factors are those that are related to the patient. They include increased patient age, impaired balance, previous history of fall, depression, impaired cognitive functioning, urinary frequency, visual impairment, nocturia, urinary incontinence, and use of medications. The other factor contributing to patient falls is extrinsic factors.

Extrinsic factors focuses on the environmental, organizational, and reason for hospitalization-related factors. One of these factors is the reason for the patient’s hospitalization. It also includes the unit conditions, cluttered environment, utilization of restraints, and lighting. Provider factors also contribute to the high prevalence of patient falls. They include ineffective leadership, failures in inter-professional communication, poor adherence to safety protocols, and inadequate orientation, training, and supervision of the staffs (Gu et al., 2016).

Fall Prevention Strategies

Several strategies have been explored in preventing patient falls in inpatient settings. One of them has been the development of standardized assessment tools that can b