Before conducting our research project we looked into a lot of potential topics we found to be interesting and wanted to research further. We finally narrowed down our topic to fall risk assessment and prevention. From this topic, we had to come up with the specific question we wanted to base our research upon. We formulated our PICOt question as “In hospital settings, what is the best practice to assess and prevent fall risk on patients”. We chose this question because fall risks are a preventable event that can occur to any patient within the hospital. Patients are meant to leave a hospital better than they came in. By understanding that it increases a person’s risk for falls, we can implement actions to prevent those falls from occurring. So, in this research study, we wanted to find the best possible way to assess and prevent falls. We conducted our research by finding 10 of the best systematic reviews on qualitative studies on fall risk from scholarly articles we could find. We used keywords such as “fall risk assessment”, “patient fall risk”, “history of patient falls”, “fall risk prevention”, and “fall risk assessment in hospitals” to find 2 articles each that we thought could help answer our PICOt question of “what are the best fall risk prevention and assessment methods”. We then sorted through each of our articles and picked out the most important parts to share with our group and eventually narrowed it down to the best 5 articles to help answer our question. The major findings of our study is that there are numerous practices to assess and prevent fall risk but there is no universal fall risk that is the “best”. The many aspects that contribute to labeling someone a fall risk such as gait instability, agitated confusion, urinary incontinence/frequency, falls history, and prescription of ‘culprit’ drugs all have different preventions/assessments based on their individual needs. From our findings, we think it would be best to take this study even further to research specific assessment tools and prevention practices for each specific fall risk. By doing this we can use these prevention practices in the future when we are working in the hospitals as nurses to identify fall risks and quickly implement the right preventions/assessments that will be effective for that specific fall risk. This experience has been relevant to our nursing career because falls are a very common incidence in the healthcare setting. As nurses, we will be utilizing fall risk assessment tools (FRATs) and prevention measures often. This research has guided us to learn more about this segment of nursing care and understand that it is necessary to have different FRATs for different patient populations, instead of one universal FRAT. Conducting the research, in general, has taught us the skills of reading and understanding research articles, identifying credible sources, conducting research and presenting research to a wider audience. Nursing is an ever-growing field; we are learning new information each and every day. Research is incredibly prevalent to our field as we continue to build on our nursing knowledge.
Authors: Gabby Burris, Anna Miller, Maddie Huels, Maggie Barney, Maeve Donoghue
Faculty Advisor: Eyad Musallam, Miami University Department of Nursing
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