Change in Nursing Practice
Jamie L. Eden
Walden University
NURS 4001-5, Research and Scholarship for Evidence-based Practice
November 16, 2013

Change in Nursing Practice A patient who is admitted to a facility may be alert, oriented, and independent in ambulation. Add on intravenous (IV) tubing attached to a pole, a telemetry monitor, a foley catheter, and new medications for the patient. This patient now has fall risk factors. The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate change in preventing falls in the hospital setting.
Falls in Hospitals Patient safety is number one in hospitals. Every staff member that comes into contact with a patient should always have the question, “Will the patient be safe?” in the back of their mind. Mistakes do happen just as patients do fall in hospitals even with prevention strategies. There are between 700,000 to 1,000,000 falls in hospitals in the United States (Preventing falls in hospitals: A toolkit for improving quality of care, 2013). If a patient falls any number of serious injuries could occur, such as bruising, lacerations, fractures, hemorrhaging, and even death. The costs of treating a patient for injuries as a result of a fall while in the hospital is not reimbursed by Medicare as of 2008 (Preventing falls in hospitals: A toolkit for improving quality of care, 2013). Not only will the facility not get reimbursed for costs related to the fall, the patient may likely have a longer length of stay and could potentially need subacute rehabilitation services that might not have otherwise been needed (Oliver, Daly, Martin, & McMurdo, 2004). At Ellis Medicine in Schenectady, New York, many tools are used to try to prevent a patient from falling. To start, a fall risk assessment is done upon admission of the patient. The fall risk assessment contains questions regarding the patients age, diagnosis,