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0:00
Hello, my name is Janice Morse.
I'm a Professor and Presidential Chair at the University of Utah College of Nursing
here in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
The title of my talk is,
"Patient Falls: Protecting Patients and Preventing Injury."
0:21
Today, I'm going to talk about a number of topics.
First, we're going to talk about why we assess patients' risk of falling
and consider whether or not you have a problem in your institution.
We'll talk about types of patient falls,
how to use the Morse Fall Scale and what the score means,
who is scored and who is not scored, and why.
Then we'll talk about how the scale works, why it is valid;
next, using interventions to prevent anticipated physiological falls;
protecting the patient from unanticipated physiological falls;
preventing accidental falls.
We'll talk about what to do when a patient falls
and how to implement a program in your hospital –
simply charting falls, interventions,
and how the fall occurred;
diagnosing fall types; injury classification; monitoring falls.
Finally, we talk about monitoring falls at the administrative level –
using fall reports diagnostically;
fall rates; falls; and fall injury rates.
1:31
Why do we bother assessing the patient's risk of falling?
At first we ask,
"Do you have a problem?
Are patients falling in your institution?
How many? How often? Are they injured?"
