A fall is a sudden, unexpected and involuntary event that results in the patient landing on the ground or at a lower level. Falls and related injuries cause costs for both the patient and the healthcare system. Falling has a significant impact on the patient's quality of life and usually has many reasons for occurring. Therefore, preventing falls among patients in healthcare settings requires a complex approach, and the recognition, assessment, and prevention of patient falls represent significant challenges. Falls are a common cause of injury and the leading cause of nonfatal injuries and trauma-related hospitalizations in the United States (Barton, 2009). Falls occur in all types of healthcare institutions and in all patient populations. Up to 12% of hospitalized patients fall at least once during their hospital stay (Kalisch, Tschannen, & Lee, 2012). In many hospitals, various strategies have been used to prevent or at least decrease the incidence of falls. However, the number of falls in hospitals is increasing at an alarming rate in the country. Hospitals try to implement more efficient intervention strategies, but the number decreases instead of decreasing. Indeed, many interventions to prevent falls and fall-related injuries require organized support and effective implementation for specific at-risk and vulnerable subpopulations, such as frail older adults and those at risk of injury. Traumatic brain injury, hip fractures, loss of independence, and injury death is one of the most serious consequences of falls (Williams, Szekendi, & Thomas, 2014). Therefore, we need fall prevention strategies and tools to define and measure falls. Ultimately, this will help healthcare teams identify risks and identify prevention strategies. The purpose of this study… half the paper… is not a single intervention or strategy that will prove successful. Indeed, strategies that might work well in a general unit may not work well in an oncology or other unit. Therefore, using different but combined fall prevention strategies would help prevent intentional and unintentional patient falls. As we have seen in this paper, most interventions, namely hourly rounding of nurses, risk assessment tools and Precautions to reduce the risk of falls, are not statically significant for reducing patient falls. However, since multiple risk factors are responsible, we should combine individual fall prevention strategies to obtain an effective prevention method also to prevent the patient from falling. It should be a multicomponent and multidisciplinary intervention that refers to a set of interventions that addresses more than one intervention category.
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