Nurse Leader Rounding to Provide Fall Prevention Strategies

Abstract

Practice Problem: Falls while patients are hospitalized are all too common. It was identified that the 300-bed facility in Southeast Georgia had a clinical practice gap with inpatient falls. Inpatient falls cause unnecessary pain and suffering to the patient and families. In addition to the negative effects to the patients, it creates a hardship to the organization. Increased length of stay and additional testing and treatments are charged to the hospital because of a fall. PICOT: The PICOT question for this project is as follows: In adult patients in an acute care setting (P), does nurse leader rounding to provide fall risk reduction strategies (I) compared to the standard fall prevention strategies (C) reduce falls (O) over an eight-week period (T)? Intervention: Nurse leader rounding was completed on new inpatient admissions to a medical surgical unit to provide fall prevention strategies. Outcome: In the 8-week period of implementation, there were 9 inpatient falls on the selected unit. Based on the total number of patient days (1506.7) this yielded a fall rate of 5.97 per 1000 patient days. Conclusion: The EBP project proved a statistically significant outcome. Using an alpha of 0.05, two independent two tailed t-tests were performed. The initial test compared the number of new inpatient admissions on the selected medical surgical floor. This test resulted in a p value of .042 which was less than the alpha of 0.05. The second t-test performed compared total inpatient days on the selected unit to the calculated fall rate per 1000 patient days. This test yielded a result of p = .005, also less than the alpha of 0.05 indicating statistical significance of the intervention.