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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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In-patient falls
— what can we learn from incident reports? | | Author(s) | Sue Hignett, Gina Sands, Paula Griffiths |
| Journal title | Age and Ageing, vol 42, no 4, July 2013 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press, July 2013 |
| Pages | pp 527-531 |
| Source | www.ageing.oxfordjournals.org |
| Keywords | In-patients ; General hospitals ; Falls ; Evaluation ; Reports. |
| Annotation | Previous research has offered useful insights on contributory factors for in-patient falls in hospitals but has been limited due to the small data set of free-text analysis. The aim of the present study was to analyse three years' national incident data (2005-08) to further explore the contributory factors of in-patient falls. A total of 20,036 reports (15% sample) were analysed by coding the free-text data field. Contributory risk factors were compared with the whole sample and explored with the Chi-squared and Fisher's exact tests. Data were reported about the degree of harm (100% of reports), (un)witnessed status of fall (78%), location (47%), patient activity (27%), physical impairment/frailty (9.5%) and cognitive impairment/confusion (9.2%). Less than 0.1% of reports provided data about dizziness, illness, vision/hearing, and medicines. Overall patients were more likely to be harmed when away from the bed space, mobilising/walking and by falling from the bed when not intending to leave the bed. This analysis explored incident reports at a level of detail not previously achieved. It identified significant contributory factors for fall locations and activities associated with physical and cognitive characteristics. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-130712227 A |
| Classmark | LF7: LD3: OLF: 4C: 6K |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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