We’ve talked about patient falls in class since the beginning of last year. We talked about risk factors for falls, scales for assessing patients, impact of falls both on patients and on the healthcare system as a whole. I thought I had a good understanding of what we could do as nurses to help our patients, like keeping the bed in the lowest position and chair alarms. I was surprised to learn that in our literature review that a lot of the techniques that I thought were evidenced-based weren’t as effective as I would have thought. It seems like educating the patient and the nursing staff is the most consistent way to prevent falls. As a result of this project, I am much more likely to talk to my patients about their risk for falls.
Our group had to make small edits to our proposal but we were set on doing fall prevention from the beginning. I think one of the biggest successes our team had was with the guideline appraisal. We started working on the assignment right after our last clinical day, in fact we were still at Maine Med. We tried finding the right guideline to use but we were getting caught up trying to find one that would meet our inclusion criteria. Eventually we realized that we weren’t working effectively and we decided to take a break. We said we’d all get lunch and meet at the Portland Campus library because we were all planning on going to the SASC review session later that afternoon. That ended up being the right call getting us to refocus and calm down, the change in scenery certainly helped. We had all been up since 5:30 am and didn’t finish everything until around 4 pm. We we’re all worried because the other groups we talked to for advice had to go back and redo their submissions and we figured there’s no way we’re getting it right on the first try considering how over-tired we all were. But we worked together and didn’t give up and earned a 100 on the assignment.
I think we work well as a team. We have a few leaders that switch depending on what the task at hand is and I think we’re all mature enough where nobody has an ego about letting someone else lead. I think our group is mature, and I hope we’ll all be good nurses one day.
This is the draft of an evidenced-based proposal to reduce the amount of falls on R6, a orthopedic/neurosurgery floor at Maine Medical Center. I worked on this in collaboration with my classmates Jenna Bilodeau, Caroline Chittum, Emily Curtis, Lexi Miner, and Emily Young. The project will be implemented as an infographic which will be placed on the unit. Please contact me at dsweeney3@une.edu if you would like to see the entire document.
