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Latest Senior Health News<\/h3>\n
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FRIDAY, Nov. 20, 2020 (HealthDay News)<\/p>\n
A new toolkit to help reduce falls and fall-related injuries among hospital patients is highly effective, a new study shows.<\/p>\n
Falls are the leading cause of preventable injury, so researchers set out to create a fall prevention<\/a> toolkit for patients and their families.<\/p>\n It includes measures such as a laminated poster to display by patients’ beds, and personalized prevention<\/a> plans that can be included in patients’ electronic health records and printed out or displayed on a computer screensaver.<\/p>\n The researchers tested the toolkit among more than 37,000 patients at three hospitals — Brigham and Women’s in Boston, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center Hospital in New York City — between September 2015 and November 2016.<\/p>\n The toolkit led to a 15% reduction in patient falls and a 34% reduction in fall-related injuries, according to the study published recently in the journal JAMA Network Open<\/em>.<\/p>\n “Our study highlights just how important it is to engage with patients for prevention,” said Patricia Dykes, a senior nurse scientist at Brigham and Women’s.<\/p>\n “If you partner with your patient to identify the risks and talk about how we can prevent them as a team, then patients and families respond to this and rise to the occasion,” Dykes added in a hospital news release.<\/p>\n The toolkit — which is available for free online — is being used at Brigham and Women’s and Mass General Brigham, and has been adopted by 150 hospitals in the United States and other countries.<\/p>\n Dykes and colleagues continue to seek feedback from nurses to get ideas on how to make the toolkit even better.<\/p>\n “This work represents a collaboration across disciplines and the input of nurses, patients and their families,” Dykes said. “Falls take a staggering toll on patients and families, and we remain focused on continuing to decrease the rates of falls, especially injurious falls, at our hospital and globally.”<\/p>\n For more on preventing falls, go to the U.S. National Library of Medicine<\/a>.<\/p>\n SOURCE: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, news release, Nov. 17, 2020<\/p>\n Robert Preidt<\/p>\n ![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
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