Online Program

294773
Fall prevention: A view from the hospital/clinic, home, and assisted living facilities


Monday, November 4, 2013 : 1:00 p.m. - 1:10 p.m.

Patricia Dykes, DNSc, RN, FAAN, FACMI, Department of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
Preventing patient falls is a three step process. The first step is identifying fall risk factors. Each patient has different risk factors. The second step is developing a plan to decrease risk. The plan must be tailored or personalized for each patient. The third step is to carry out the plan. Our team designed a fall prevention toolkit, Fall TIPS (Tailoring Interventions for Patient Safety) that made it easy for health care providers to complete the three steps of the fall prevention process. We also learned that patients and family caregivers require tools to participate in the three steps of the fall prevention process. Interdisciplinary teams in inpatient settings can prevent falls by teaching patients why they are at risk for falls and involving patients and family caregivers in developing a personalized fall prevention plan. Collaboration in this process ensures that the fall prevention plan is feasible and engages the patient/family caregiver in implementation of the fall prevention plan. This presentation will demonstrate how the Fall TIPS toolkit was used to support this partnership and to decrease the rate of patient falls in hospital settings by 22%.

Learning Areas:

Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Clinical medicine applied in public health
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Public health or related nursing
Public health or related research

Learning Objectives:
Describe fall prevention approaches for older adults in hospitals, home, and assisted living facilities. Discuss public health approaches including a fall prevention toolkit.

Keyword(s): Elderly, Injury Prevention

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have been a primary investigator of externally funded fall prevention grants and I am first author on fall prevention intervention paper published in JAMA that demonstrated the first health information technology intervention to significantly decrease falls in acute care hospitals.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.