I was just wondering what type of post fall neurochecks that other facilities, mainly longterm care facilities, have in place. When I first started at my current job a few years ago, whenever a resident had an unwitnessed fall we would initiate neurochecks every four hours for 24 hours.
Within the last year they introduced a new protocol that seems pretty excessive to me, especially considering how short staffed we are many times. Now for every unwitnessed fall we do neurochecks every 15 mins times 4, then every 30 mins times 4, then every hour times 4, then every 4 hours times 4, then every 8 hours times 8. The neurochecks include a full set of vitals everytime. I had a lady fall at the beginning of my 12 hour shift yesterday and I had to do 13 neurochecks on her, 13 sets of vitals. Let me tell you how happy she was about that. I was the only nurse for 27 patients. And god forbid if you have 2 or more falls. It starts to feel like you don't have time for anything else. Anytime we find a resident sitting on the fall mat beside their bed for the 5th time in a day, we do these neurochecks. Some people fall every single day. If I suspected someone needed that many neurochecks, my butt would be on the phone with the doctor to see if maybe they needed to go to a hospital and have more extensive tests done. So because of this, most of the people I'm doing these checks on are the regular fallers in low beds who crawl out of onto their mat.
Maybe I'm just wrong about this and neurochecks are needed this much for every single fall, but if so, then they need to hire a person who's only responsibility is neurochecks. At my facility, this person would be very very busy doing only this! I just feel like it's another one of those facility liability things that is taking care away from my patients.
