Abstract
Despite efforts in hospitals to identify patients at risk for falls and to prevent these incidents, falls among hospitalized patients are not a rare event and continue to be a major health care concern, occurring in approximately 700,000–1,000,000 hospitalized patients per year.
The purpose of this study was to examine intrinsic, extrinsic, and workforce factors that contribute to falls among hospitalized adult patients.
A retrospective correlational design was used to examine 160 patients admitted to a medical–surgical unit over the year 2012. Analytical weighting was applied to the study sample to conduct bivariate and multivariate analysis.
In multivariate analysis, the variables age, narcotic/sedative use, and overnight shift, significantly predicted the likelihood of a fall during the hospitalization. Cardiovascular disease, neuromusculoskeletal disease, evening shift, the implementation of fall prevention strategies and higher RN to unlicensed assistive personnel staffing ratios decreased the likelihood of a fall during the hospitalization. In addition, patients at high risk for falls using the Hendrich I fall scale were nearly 17% more likely to fall during the hospitalization.
Many factors influence the occurrence of a fall in hospitalized patients. Fall risk assessment and the implementation of fall prevention strategies are both effective strategies in the clinical area to identify and decrease the probability of a fall. The presence of the RN is significant in fall prevention in medical–surgical patients.