Fall prevention at your facility

[rn2b2007]

Hi All,

I am currently working at a hospital in Pittsburgh and a member of the Quality Committee. Our hospital is at an all time high with patient falls. If anyone out there has a suggestion or a policy or protocol in place at their facility that works or has helped to decreased falls, I am all ears.

I work on a Family Practice unit. We tend to get quite a few nursing home residents that have dementia. For the past few months we have had quite an increase in falls on our unit alone, most were due to patients with dementia or altered mental status. With these patients the bed alarms work well as well as retraints being the last resort.

any suggestions would be great.:loveya:

[1TachyRN, RN]

We use sitters and bed alarms a lot at our facility. Restraints also (as a last resort), but mainly for altered patients in the unit that have arterial or venous lines that could cause serious problems if they're pulled out.

[MisterSimba, BSN]

Bed alarms, sitters, vest restraints if necessary...

Do you have any volunteers at your facility? I've found that sitting and talking to patients about their grandchildren, pets, travel experiences, etc... can distract them and keep them from trying to get out of bed.... at least for a while!

[northwestwind]

With falls ending in injury on the "never list" from Medicare, with implementation Oct. 1, your organization has quite a bit to worry about....

Start looking at industrial best practice for safety issues, such as Toyota's Lean or Six Sigma for healthcare. This usually begins in a Quality Committee with plenty of documented safety occurrences, particularly falls. As this goes through the chain of command, more people will see what you already know.

The hospital will have to spend some big bucks to hire consultants to come in, work up a final report, and help you implement changes. The costs not to do it far outweight any upfront costs, however. Start gathering financial information on longer stays because of fall injuries, from finance. Medicare will not pay for this anymore - so finance departments are busy tracking this. If they aren't, they should be.

In the meantime, hopefully there will be some good examples provided here.

[Franlpntorn]

We also have bed alarms but we assessment tool are they a fall risk. Any falls in the last 6 months? If yes the we have a fall sheet and we chack on them every 15 mins. Not the best ideal. We have identified a possable problem Pt.