NRS-493 Capstone Project Topic Selection And Approval

Sample Paper

Hospital falls have become a popular occurrence in hospitals with respect to inpatient patients. In the recent past, this hazard has become increasingly difficult to fight especially with the significant decrease in the amount of time nurses get to spend time at the bedside of their patients (Thompson, Cullum, McCaughan, Sheldon, & Raynor, 2004).

The Setting

Occurrences of hospital falls have increased at the bedside of patients and also in the bathrooms. From time to time, patients trying to get off their beds are unable to do this therefore end up falling in the process. In other incidents, patients using the bathroom often fall as a result of the slippery floor and their instability as a result of heavy sedation or general body weakness (Taylor, 2012).

The Problem, Issue, Suggestion, Initiative, or Education Need

It is noteworthy that this problem majorly affects elderly patients who are 65 years of age and older. A significant contributing factor to this is that elderly patients possibly have weak bone structures as a result of age hence their general weakness, often resulting in falling while in the hospital (Thomas & Mackintosh, 2015). In addition to this, a decrease in the time nurses get to spend with patients deprives nurses the opportunity to monitor patients in order to reduce falls. In other cases, patients are heavily sedated contributing to their poor balancing, a state that significantly increases chances of falling.

Impact on Work Environment, Quality of Care, and Patient Outcomes

The consequences as a result of patient falls in hospitals are far reaching, not only affecting patient outcomes, but also the hospital work environment and the quality of care provided to patients. Taking a look at the effects of falls on patient outcomes, hospital falls have been an inhibiting factor to fast recovery of patients in hospitals.

In this regard, patients who are victims of falls often end up being injured contributing to their health problems (Singh, Okeke, & Edwards, 2015). For example, patients who have recently undergone surgery fall and get injured in the specific wounds before the wounds heal.

This prolongs their recovery time hence lengthening their stay in the hospital. Shifting gears to quality of care provided, hospital falls are a subtracting factor to quality of care given to patients in hospitals. Hospital falls are a pointer of lack of safety for inpatients.

This significantly affects the reputation of hospitals with a high number of falls (Franck et al., 2017). The effects of hospital falls on the work environment are centered on the compromise of patient safety during their stay in the hospital. Pertinent to this, the work environment is rendered unsafe for patients having in mind that there is a high potential for patients to fall (Tzeng, Titler, Ronis, & Yin, 2012).

Implications to Nursing

Hospital falls impact a strain to nurses, significantly affecting the nursing profession. Keeping in mind that nurses are mandated to take care of patients, such accidents are a demeaning factor to the nursing profession. With that, nurses are seen to deliver poor services demonstrating incompetency in their work (Araújo et al., 2017).

Conclusion

Though there are no distinct recommendations to curtail falls, there are preventive measures that can be upheld and reduce these occurrences. One of the ways is to conduct comprehensive staff training on how to reduce chances of hospital falls. Secondly, the layout of bathrooms and the entire hospital environment ought to be designed in such a way that there is a decreased probability of a fall occurring. These measures can be effective in reducing falls (Babine et al., 2016).

References

  • Babine, R. L., Hyrkäs, K. E., Bachand, D. A., Chapman, J. L., Fuller, V. J., Honess, C. A., & Wierman, H. R. (2016). Falls in a tertiary care hospital—Association with delirium: A replication study. Psychosomatics, 57(3), 273-282. doi:10.1016/j.psym.2016.01.003
  • Thomas, S., & Mackintosh, S. (2015). Improvement of physical therapist assessment of risk of falls in the hospital and discharge handover through an intervention to modify clinical behavior. Physical Therapy, 96(6), 764-773. doi:10.2522/ptj.20150215
  • Thompson, C., Cullum, N., McCaughan, D., Sheldon, T., & Raynor, P. (2004). Nurses, information use, and clinical decision making–the real world potential for evidence-based decisions in nursing. Evidence-Based Nursing, 7(3), 68-72. doi:10.1136/ebn.7.3.68
  • Singh, I., Okeke, J., & Edwards, C. (2015). Outcome of in-patient falls in hospitals with 100% single rooms and multi-bedded wards. Age and Ageing, 44(6), 1032-1035. doi:10.1093/ageing/afv124
  • Franck, L. S., Gay, C. L., Cooper, B., Ezrre, S., Murphy, B., Chan, J. S., … Meer, C. R. (2017). The Little Schmidy Pediatric Hospital Fall Risk Assessment Index: A diagnostic accuracy study. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 68, 51-59. doi:10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2016.12.011
  • Tzeng, H., Titler, M. G., Ronis, D. L., & Yin, C. (2012). The contribution of staff call light response time to fall and injurious fall rates: an exploratory study in four US hospitals using archived hospital data. BMC Health Services Research, 12(1). doi:10.1186/1472-6963-12-84