Effectiveness of Physical Activity Interventions in Reducing Falls among Elderly Patients

Running head: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
NURSING ASSIGNMENT
Name of the student
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Introduction
Evidence based nursing practice helps the healthcare professionals associated in the care
process with effective interventions so that they could take quality decisions and make the care
process relevant (Bray et al. 2018). One such critical complication that majority of the geriatric
nursing professionals faces is implementing interventions that could prevent or reduce the falls
among elderly patients. As per Davies and O'mahony (2015), one in every three individual above
the age of 65 is suffering from the risk of fall as the total number of population that are above the
age of 65 is 11% of the total population.
Therefore the evidence based research question that this paper would use for conducting
evidence based literature search is:
Does the application of physical activity interventions could help to reduce the risk of
falls among the elderly population of Ireland?
The PICO structure of this question would be:
Population Intervention Comparison Outcome
Elderly patients at the
risk of falls
physical activities compared to other
interventions
reduces the risk of
falls
Literature search strategy
After developing the research question for evidence based nursing practice, literature
search would be conducted so that the interventions and their effectiveness could be developed.
Multiple keywords would be developed so that’s searching them over electronic databases could
provide numerous research papers. The keywords that would be used for this literature search

2NURSING ASSIGNMENT
would be such as “risk of fall”, “elderly patients”, “physical activities”, physical activities
reduces risk of falls”. After developing these keywords, these would be connected through
Boolean operators such as AND, OR, NOT so that through permutation and combination of these
search terms, effective and appropriate research articles could be collected from electronic
databases.
The electronic database that would be selected for this search strategy is Pub Med. As per
Lawrence (2016), Pub Med is the scientific database in which numerous nursing research articles
are present. Further, the multiple level of security would help to sieve through the research
articles that would help to identify the effectiveness of the evidences and would help to answer
the research question. In Pub Med, multiple filters would be used for identification of accurate
research articles, such as publication year within 2015 to 2019, peer reviewed journal article,
English language, and research articles would be collected. Further, the exclusion criteria would
be the languages other than English, abstract papers, descriptive articles with no data analysis
and research aspects, so that effectiveness of the evidences could be identified.
Critical appraisal of the articles
As per Department of Health and Children of Ireland ministry (2019) more than 468,000
people (11.1%) in Ireland are elderly and above the age of 65 and within 2025, more than 18% of
the population would reach to that level. as per LoBiondo-Wood and Haber (2017), fall is one of
the critical health complication and associated risk factor that the elderly people suffer from and
as per the data of hen and Schulz (2015) it was mentioned that every 80 deaths in 10,000 deaths
of elderly people occurs due to severe fall and fall associated health complication. As per hen
and Schulz (2015), there are multiple complications that the elderly population suffers from due