Fall prevention: A view from the hospital/clinic, home, and assisted living facilities

Preventing patient falls is a three step process. The first step is identifying fall risk factors. Each patient has different risk factors. The second step is developing a plan to decrease risk. The plan must be tailored or personalized for each patient. The third step is to carry out the plan. Our team designed a fall prevention toolkit, Fall TIPS (Tailoring Interventions for Patient Safety) that made it easy for health care providers to complete the three steps of the fall prevention process. We also learned that patients and family caregivers require tools to participate in the three steps of the fall prevention process. Interdisciplinary teams in inpatient settings can prevent falls by teaching patients why they are at risk for falls and involving patients and family caregivers in developing a personalized fall prevention plan. Collaboration in this process ensures that the fall prevention plan is feasible and engages the patient/family caregiver in implementation of the fall prevention plan. This presentation will demonstrate how the Fall TIPS toolkit was used to support this partnership and to decrease the rate of patient falls in hospital settings by 22%.