Revista de enfermería y cuidados

Falls as an extraordinary event in health care facilities

Abstract

Marcela Izova, Michaela Vicanova and Maria Novysedlakova

Introduction: Patient`s falls are often due to misconduct by healthcare professionals, inappropriate risk assessment or misdiagnosis. Number of falls is one of the quality indicators provided by nursing care. Slovak researchers together with French colleagues found out that falls were the second most undesirable events in health care. The purpose of our study is to describe the falls and its prevention in healthcare facilities.

Methodology: The study used a questionnaire as a data collection method. The results are evaluated in the form of absolute and relative abundance. For the purposes of analysis we used a chi-squared test. The results were interpreted at the significance level α=0.05.

Results and discussion: Results of analysis (p=0.00) indicates that nurses use an interview with a patient and a family members in determining the risk of fall. These results were at statistically higher levels. The result of analysis (p=0.00) in a different scenario indicates that there is a dependency between departments and education about factors that increase risk of falling. Accident and emergency nurses provide education at significantly higher rate than nurses in other departments. Nurses indicate that the most common cause of falls was slippage. The results of analysis (p=0.02) showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the approach nurses report a fall report on individual departments. Respondents in all departments apart from internal department report a fall to a doctor.

Conclusion: Identification of a risk patient should be considered a key concern in prevention of falls and in planning patient`s care