Patient falls are considered to be a crucial safety concern in clinical practice. Nevertheless, there is an evident lack of systematic techniques to reduce the frequency of such incidents. A patient fall is a descent to the floor with or without injury to the patient. Thus, numerous risk factors should be eliminated to minimize the risks that patients can be exposed to while at a hospital.
In pediatrics, patient falls are of major concern since children and adolescents are generally more active. Most early attempts to analyze and solve the problem centered around the techniques that helped identify those young patients most likely to fall. Nevertheless, these studies did not provide uniform generalized ideas on how to prevent such occurrences. Therefore, medical workers had to develop and utilize various ingenious practices that sometimes proved risky. For instance, some nurses used to pin the call bell to the nightshirts of the most restless patients. Thus, it activated the emergency call bell systems when patients climbed out of bed.
Numerous studies have been conducted recently to develop and establish a single framework that can help reduce the frequency of patient falls at all hospitals nationwide. According to Watson et al. (2019), hospital policies, reduced supervision, disease processes, the environment, and patients transferring without assistance dominated the increased risks of patient falls. Therefore, hospitals can improve supervision and provide various enhancements, such as introducing lower beds, among other measures.
Patient falls represent a unique problem directly linked to the environment medical workers create and sustain at a given hospital. High patient fall rates can unexpectedly undermine all the efforts of doctors and nurses. Therefore, it is crucial to address the issue by encouraging nurses to care about the environment and safety standards at hospitals as much as about the treatment process.
References
Watson, B., Salmoni, A., & Zecevic, A. (2019). Case analysis of factors contributing to patient falls. Clinical Nursing Research, 28(8), 911–930. Web.