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A Project of Improving Accidental Falls Among Dementia Ward Inpatients

1
Y. Chen and K. Chou 1

1 School of Nursing, Taipei Medical University, Chinese Taipei

Background: The incidence of falls is one of the most common patient safety events. Therefore, “fall
prevention and injury reduction” have been listed in the Annual Patient Safety Goals of year by the
Joint Commission of Taiwan.

Objective: There is a total of 0.53% (target value: 0.37%) fall rate occurred in our unit from January to
December in 2018 due to the caregivers’ lack of company, insufficient knowledge of displacement,
without seeking assistance timely because of being too confident, and the patients’ unsteady gait
insisting on walking.

Methods: we analyzed and found out what went wrong by creating a special team, and we planned
to hold a sharing seminar of falls prevention, which provided bedside rails and strength training, and
designed fall-related knowledge posters, videos, and QR code.

Results: The fall rate of patients in the hospital decreased from 0.53% to 0.23% and the rate of falls
preventive measure increased from 60.0% to 83.3%. The objective was achieved in falls prevention.

Conclusion: The biggest limitation of this project is that patients with dementia differ from typical
medical and surgical patients. Due to the interference of neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia,
such as decreased cognitive understanding, poor memory, and therefore low cooperation, patients
may not follow instructions and insist on getting out of bed. Consequently, prevention of falls often
relies more on caregivers. Moreover, since the majority of caregivers in this unit are foreign nurses,
current practice is to have nurses of the same nationality and with no language barriers assist in
translation when faced with foreign nurses who have poor communication and comprehension skills.
Poster Presentation Abstracts
Sometimes, there are situations where there are no nurses of the same nationality, which presents
significant communication challenges. It is recommended that the unit should establish multilingual
versions of educational brochures and videos to facilitate future use by foreign nurses.

Keywords: dementia, falls

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Correspondence: Yu Chen, School of Nursing, Taipei Medical University, Chinese Taipei
E-mail: d432110005@tmu.edu.tw

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