Patient-Centered Fall Prevention Strategies
Research Question: In adult patients in the intensive care unit, how does an educational intervention focused on patient-centered fall prevention strategies, compared to standard patient fall prevention strategies, reduce fall incidence among adult ICU patients within four weeks?
Preventing falls in intensive care units is a significant issue for healthcare organizations considering delivering excellent and safe treatment as their primary purpose. While care providers continue developing and executing fall prevention measures, nurses have a crucial role in executing fall prevention protocols in the Intensive Care Unit. An educational intervention majoring in the patient-centered fall prevention model could be used to reduce falls among adult patients within four weeks, as opposed to the standard approaches being used today in the ICU.
The null hypothesis is that the current standard fall prevention programs use risk assessment to provide quality services to adult patients without needing to focus on them. While numerous hazard identification kits are available, these evaluation methods and threat-guided initiatives are not continually used, describing many adult patients’ rapidly increasing rate of falls.
The alternate hypothesis is that improving the risk assessment tools in the standard fall prevention strategies into patient-centered ones will boost their efficiency. Patient-centered practices are concerned with giving services to the patients by dealing with the participant’s ideas and values, connecting the service user, having an empathetic attitude, making a collective decision, and meeting fitness demands (Avanecean et al., 2017).
Independent variables include the nurses and the posters used to provide tips to avoid falling. Dependent variables are the number of falls recorded within the four weeks of the patient-centered fall prevention strategy. A positive prediction is to be expected from the variable relationship above. More of the independent variables will largely reduce the dependent variables.
Other factors that might affect the outcome include a higher number of patients in the same facility needing intensive care services and a shortage of risk assessment kits, causing congestion in the strategy. For instance, when a higher number of patients admitted in the ICU is received, nursing services will struggle to attend to all at a patient-centered level.
References
Avanecean, D., Calliste, D., Contreras, T., Lim, Y., & Fitzpatrick, A. (2017). Effectiveness of patient-centered interventions on falls in the acute care setting compared to usual care: A systematic review. JBI Evidence Synthesis, 15(12), 3006–3048.