Patient Moment Experience

Introduction Have you ever been a situation whereby an elderly patient with high fall risk was left alone in a toilet? Elderly tend to be more fragile and are prone to serious injuries when they fall. (Hill & Fauerbach, n.d.). In hospital wards, nurses do the best measurements to ensure zero falls, maintain a clean record and raise awareness to prevent falls. Description It was an incident that happened during one of my clinical placement in September.

There are many concerns the scenario illuminates for practicing nurses. Prior to going out on placement to a healthy facility,

The staff nurses and patient care technicians (PCT) in 6 East were not getting the sufficient education reinforcement regarding fall prevention. Consequently, this has created a knowledge gap among staff members regarding fall prevention strategies. The knowledge gap in fall prevention has led to an increase of staff non-compliance with the policy and the trending increase of fall rates in the unit during the 1st and 2nd quarter of 2015. The plan to mitigate this problem was developed through the collaboration with the nursing leadership on the provision of staff education on fall prevention. The stakeholders involved were the unit manager, fall prevention resource nurse, and clinical nurse educator who were interested in coordinating the quality

Falls of critically ill patients admitted to the ICU routine should be avoided developing certain strategies used outside this area, such as prevention of displacement, promote stability, elimination of sliding hazards routinely ensure that the patient is oriented to the environment and the bell is at the fingertips, keeping the beds in the lowest position and braking, providing adequate lighting, and provide anti-slip footwear and technical assistance in lifting patients bed. The response time of the call prolonged ringing patient or family is just one of the potential causes of falls, firstly because if the response time is greater serve their needs later, and partly because no response to the patient may start feeling agitated. Shift schedules nurses can be particularly effective in preventing falls, as they allow the staff to anticipate and address the needs of each patient. The tubing, drains and cables must be securely to prevent tripping when lifting or embody patients. Although falls can happen without warning, subsequent falls can be avoided if the etiology of them is

Objective One During my clinical day three, I demonstrated entry-level competence in professional nursing practice in caring for patients with multiple and/or complex unmet human needs. I addressed safety needs, safety in medication administration, effective communication, and surveillance for my patients. First, I addressed safety needs my ensuring the appropriate safety measures were implemented for the patients. Some of the safety measures included, wearing non-skid socks, wearing a yellow armband which indicated fall risk, keeping the bed in lowest position, two side rails up, bed locked, and the call light within reach.

This is reviewed with any change in patient status, a fall, and/or quarterly. Patients, depending on screening, might receive services from physical therapy (PT), occupational therapy (OT), nutritional services, bed/chair alarms, floor mats, medication adjustment, and change in room to closer to the nurses’ station, or other services. All at risk patients are easily identifiable by notation on wrist band, footwear, room and equipment signage, in the electronic medical record, and on any paper records. The fall rate of patients at SAVAHCS continues to be at or slightly below the benchmark, but our goal is to have zero falls. The intervention not fully utilized at this hospital, that does show promise in the literature, is the post-fall huddle.

Significance of the Problem for Nursing: Prevention of falls in the elderly is an extremely important facet of nursing. Elderly falls often result in fractures, pain, decreased mobility, traumatic hemorrhages, as well as increased healthcare costs. Due to the increased prevalence of injuries acquired from elderly falls, increased risk of morbidity in the elderly experiencing falls, and the growing number of elderly patients, it is of vast importance that nurses research and incorporate evidence-based fall prevention practices to prevent falls in the elderly

The policy and procedure to be examined presents guidelines for both preventing and documenting falls in an acute care setting. This policy is to be used daily and with every patient in a hospital setting.

This act created a major revision of standards of care for nursing homes. This legislation also changed the expectations and the quality of care that patients should receive in long term care facilities. This Nursing Home Reform Act passed by congress specifically stated “that each residents have the right to be free from any physical or chemical restraints imposed for purposes of discipline or convenience and not required to treat the resident’s medical symptoms”. While there may be some benefits to using restraints in nursing homes, however, studies have shown that using restraints in nursing homes negatively impacts patients and for the most part does not prevent them from falling or from other incidents that may occur. There are very high levels of risks associated with the use of restraints (Lapane,150).

(Joint Commissions, 2014).It is important for nurses to explain how to use the call light to the elderly patients, and also to ask for help before getting out of bed. Vulnerable patients should be placed close to the nursing station for close monitoring. It is very important to educate health care workers on the approaches used to prevent falls. The measures used to prevent falls in the elderly could include; carrying out a risk assessment during admission, placing colorful stickers outside their doors, stopping the use of psychotropic medications, teaching them the best way to use their assistive device, placing their call light and belonging within their reach, placing their beds in the lowest position with brakes /wheels locked at all times, removing throw rugs from their surroundings, making sure that they are wearing non-skid shoes/socks before ambulating and also giving them their prescribed Vitamin D supplement as well as encouraging them on the use of their corrective glasses or hearing aids. It is very important to educate health care workers on the approaches used to prevent

Communication in nursing is known for its life saving success as well as its greatest flaw in poor patient outcomes. There is always room for improvement and when communication is carried out efficiently, healthcare professionals have reaped the benefits. However, there have been many instances in which nurses have had to learn the hard way of how detrimental communication can be to patient safety. Through research and reviews of literature, the topic of patient safety related to handoff communication among units is analyzed.

1. What errors did you see in protecting the patient’s privacy?  There were several errors done on protecting patient’s privacy. Firstly, when Mildred soaked her bed, nurse shouted loudly asking for the clean bed sheet saying that the patient had soaked herself which is extremely embarrassing to her.

In general, patient fall is the neglected subject in the hospitals. This topic is neglected because most of the hospitals didn’t report fall cases anywhere due to safeguard reason. When a patient is admitted to the hospital, most of the attention is used to give to the primary condition of the patient. Also, both family members and healthcare staff concerned about the primary condition of the patient. However, this fall and its subsequent consequences can be very serious and harmful to the patient.

In our unit, almost every patient has a bed alarm and chair alarm. Our unit is neurotrauma; therefore, most of the patients are the risk of a fall. So, having a bed alarm and chair alarm is for the safety of the patient and I would keep the same procedure. However, many types of research have been proven that having so many alarm can diminish the nurses, or nursing aides respond ability to the sound. Therefore, I believe if a patient does not need the bed alarm, then it is better not to use it.

As a nurse, how we can managing to prevent patients falling down? The most important thing when patients admitted to hospital is to assess patients experience any fall before, we can using SPLATT. Symptoms experienced at time of fall(s). Previous number of fall or near falls. Location of fall(s).