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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Key issues to consider and innovative ideas on fall prevention in the geriatric department of a teaching hospital | | Author(s) | Daniel K Y Chan, Cathie Sherrington, Vasi Naganathan |
| Journal title | Australasian Journal on Ageing, vol 37, no 2, June 2018 |
| Publisher | Wiley, June 2018 |
| Pages | pp 140-143 |
| Source | http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ajag |
| Keywords | Falls ; Cognitive impairment ; Geriatric hospitals ; Preventative medicine ; Accident prevention ; Evaluation ; Australia. |
| Annotation | Falls in hospital are common and up to 70% result in injury, leading to increased length of stay and accounting for 10% of patient safety-related deaths. Yet high quality evidence guiding best practice is lacking. Fall prevention strategies have worked in some trials but not in others. Differences in study setting (acute, subacute, rehabilitation) and sampling of patients (cognitively intact or impaired) may explain the difference in results. This New South Wales based study looked at these important issues and described strategies to prevent falls in the acute hospital setting, based on the authors' own practice experience. In particular they engaged cognitively impaired patients who were more likely to fall. The authors used video clips rather than verbal instruction to educate patients, and were optimistic that this approach may work. They also explored the option of co-locating high fall risk patients in a close observation room for supervision with promising results. Further studies using larger sample sizes are required to confirm these findings. (JL). |
| Accession Number | CPA-180629205 A |
| Classmark | OLF: E4: LDA: LK2: OQ: 4C: 7YA |
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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