Patient Safety in Geriatric Population

Geriatric population
Patient Safety in Geriatric Population

SIGNIFICANCE OF HOURLY ROUNDING IN IMPROVING PATIENT SAFETY IN GERIATRIC POPULATION

Aim: Unintentional patient fall clinical economic burden cannot be contested. The increased incidences of geriatric patient falls combined with the impacts of nurse shortages results to increased staff workloads. In turn, the increased workloads are associated with noncompliance with patient safety interventions and basic falls preventive measures. The shortage of nurses, increased of patient acuity, and time constraints increase the probability of creating a stressful environments with low compliance of  fall prevention protocol, leading to fatal fall related injuries and mortality.

Methodology: This mixed research paper explores on the evidence based practice for fall prevention strategies are significant to nurse profession because they will significantly reduce unintentional patient fall incidences, and lower workloads that cause increased nurse burnout.

Results: Evidence based study indicates that hourly rounding promote patient safety, quality of care and patient satisfaction. The evidence based practice outcome have been documented in systematic reviews that it results into reduction of patient falls by 52%, use of call lights and bells by 37%,  pressure ulcers by 14% and increases patient satisfaction by 12%.

Conclusion: The proposed recommendation is to initiate hourly nurse rounding program in geriatric population ward. Hourly rounding is a systematic nursing intervention that is designed to address the needs of hospitalized geriatric population using an approach that reduced patient falls and related complication.

Introduction

Patient falls are strong indicators of quality of care that is often used to monitor quality performance within departments, local and national level. The physical injuries include bruising, pain, scratches, lacerations, fractures and intracranial bleeding.  Patient falls and related injuries not only affect patient safety, but also damages hospitals reputation. Hourly rounding has positive impact on healthcare facility in four major variables namely a) reduction of patient fall, b) low emergency care due to fall related injuries, c) reduce hospitalization days and d) increase patient outcomes (Lee et al. 2013).

Therefore, this paper explores whether “In geriatric patients admitted in the orthopedic ward, is use hourly rounding’s (I) or call light use (C) more effective in improving patient safety, in six months (T)?” (Bennett, Ockerby, Stinson, Willcocks, & Chalmers, 2014).

Nature of the problem

 Research indicates that the most common etiology for nonfatal injuries in geriatric population is unintentional falls.  Approximately, 25-32% of geriatric patients experience falls each year, where females experience frequent falls as compared to males(Iaboni et al. 2015). In addition, unintentional fall-related injuries are the major cause for accidental deaths among the geriatric patients, which results to approximately 41 deaths related to unintentional falls per 100,000 people annually.

Injury and mortality rates continue to rise dramatically for geriatric populations across the ethnic populations. Research indicates that the increased unintentional fall rates among the geriatric population continues to drift away from the Healthy people fall-prevention goal, indicating that unintentional fall is a growing public health concern that needs  to be addressed adequately ( Iaboni et al. 2015).

Reference

Neumeier, M. (2013). Using Kotter’s change management theory and innovation diffusion theory in implementing an electronic medical record. Canadian Journal of nursing informatics Vol.8 (2). Retrieved from http://cjni.net/journal/?p=2880

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