Katelyn Harth

1-2 Rough Draft of Section 1 of the Change Proposal

Southern New Hampshire University: NUR 490

August 27^th, 2021Marketing Research and Data Analysis

Professional Practice Issue

Healthcare is not always perfect and mistakes due happen, but some missteps can lead to the demise of a patient and their health. One major problem that has been seen is the number of falls that occur in health care facilities. This occurrence still remains to be a substantial problem and are one of the most common adverse events recorded by hospitals each year. Hospital-acquired falls are not only dangerous and can lead to further complications for patients, but they are also costly for the healthcare facility it occurs in. “Each year, roughly 700,000 to 1 million patient falls occur in U.S. hospitals resulting in around 250,000 injuries and up to 11,000 deaths. About 2% of hospitalized patients fall at least once during their stay. Approximately one in four falls result in injury, with about 10% resulting in serious injury” [CITATION LeL19 p 273 l 1033 ]. Falls can be related to the age of the patient, medications being taken, a cluttered room, the mental status of the patient, restraints being used incorrectly or the patient’s current injury. Fall prevention is crucial to decrease the number of incidents that occur.

“Falls with injury are a serious and prevalent safety issue in U.S. hospitals, costing over $14,000 per occurrence (The Joint Commission, 2015). As of 2008, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (2020) stopped paying for costs associated with inpatient falls if the fall was preventable. Despite interventions, falls continue to be one of the most reported safety events. Use of evidence-based fall prevention strategies is imperative to confront the problem” (Rohm, et al., 2020, p. 303). Because Medicare and Medicaid stopped paying for fall associated injuries, hopsitals are reliable to pay the care provided to patients, which can become a large sum of money. Hospitals are starting to transition from fee-for-service payments to bundled payments, which are also linked with patient satisfaction (Leaf Healthcare, 2016).

Prevention needs to begin on admission when gathering information and assessing the patient.This needs to be an ongoing process that occurs by all heathcare team members in order to save the patient from harm and the hospital money. Nurses are the ones at the bedside constantly, so the patient should be assessed by each nurse who cares for them at the beginning of their shift and then at the end of the shift when another nurse is coming on to take over care. This can be one step in prevemting this occurance among many others that would be beneficial. Depending on the assessment and the patietns current status, further prevention and precautions will need to be placed but this is a start.

References

Feedback:

Katelyn you have a great problem but now you need to be very specific and state the purpose of your change which I assume would be to decrease falls, how you plan to do this, and what you want the outcome to be.  

Your introduction paragraph should only be about 8 to 10 sentences and is very specific to the problem and purpose.

Please see you paper attached her for more comments directly on the paper.  All corrections need to be made each week and moved forward with the next draft section.

Please reach out with any questions.