Preventing hospital falls: feasibility of care workforce redesign to optimise patient falls education

Morris, Meg; Thwaites, Claire; Lui, Rosalie; McPhail, Steven M; Haines, Terry; Kiegaldie, Debra; Heng, Hazel; Shaw, Louise; Hammond, Susan; McKercher, Jonathan; Knight, Matthew; Carey, Leeanne; Gray, Richard; Shorr, Ron; Hill, Anne-Marie

doi:10.1093/ageing/afad250

Preventing hospital falls: feasibility of care workforce redesign to optimise patient falls education

journal contribution

posted on 2025-01-10, 04:00 authored by Meg MorrisMeg Morris, Claire ThwaitesClaire Thwaites, Rosalie Lui, Steven M McPhail, Terry Haines, Debra Kiegaldie, Hazel HengHazel Heng, Louise Shaw, Susan Hammond, Jonathan McKercherJonathan McKercher, Matthew KnightMatthew Knight, Leeanne CareyLeeanne Carey, Richard GrayRichard Gray, Ron Shorr, Anne-Marie Hill

Objective: To examine the feasibility of using allied health assistants to deliver patient falls prevention education within 48 h after hospital admission.

Design and setting: Feasibility study with hospital patients randomly allocated to usual care or usual care plus additional patient falls prevention education delivered by supervised allied health assistants using an evidence-based scripted conversation and educational pamphlet.

Participants: (i) allied health assistants and (ii) patients admitted to participating hospital wards over a 20-week period.

Outcomes: (i) feasibility of allied health assistant delivery of patient education; (ii) hospital falls per 1,000 bed days; (iii) injurious falls; (iv) number of falls requiring transfer to an acute medical facility.

Results: 541 patients participated (median age 81 years); 270 control group and 271 experimental group. Allied health assistants (n = 12) delivered scripted education sessions to 254 patients in the experimental group, 97% within 24 h after admission. There were 32 falls in the control group and 22 in the experimental group. The falls rate was 8.07 falls per 1,000 bed days in the control group and 5.69 falls per 1,000 bed days for the experimental group (incidence rate ratio = 0.66 (95% CI 0.32, 1.36; P = 0.26)). There were 2.02 injurious falls per 1,000 bed days for the control group and 1.03 for the experimental

Funding

This trial was funded by a National Health and Medical Research Council Partnership Grant, GNT1152853. A-MH receives salary support from a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia Investigator (EL2) grant(GNT1174179) and the Royal Perth Hospital Research Foundation. MEM receives salary support from Healthscope and La Trobe University. The authors declare no conflicts of interest associated with this trial.

History

Publication Date

2024-01-02

Journal

Age and Ageing

Volume

53

Issue

1

Article Number

afad250

Pagination

9p.

Publisher

Oxford University Press

ISSN

0002-0729

Rights Statement

© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Geriatrics Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.